Storm chasers will find thrills in this tale of nature’s wrath.
Tracking a furious, lethal storm.
In her debut nonfiction book, Yahoo News correspondent Bailey, a former White House correspondent for Newsweek, gives a tense recounting of the devastating tornado that struck her hometown of Moore, Oklahoma, on May 20, 2013. Central Oklahoma is called “tornado alley” because of the frequency and severity of twisters that tear through the region, but after five tornadoes struck Moore in 15 years, that town earned an epithet as “the tornado alley of tornado alley.” As in many disaster books, we first meet the major players: Gary England, a trusted TV weather forecaster aiming to tamp down sensationalism; his feisty rival Mike Morgan; their young counterpart, Damon Lane, newly hired at another station; a National Weather Service forecaster; the principal of an elementary school directly in the twister’s path; Moore’s city manager; and many others. Nail-biting chronology drives the plot, which lags a bit when characters’ worries repeat in chapter after chapter. Tornadoes are mysterious weather phenomena, Bailey learned, that only recently have become somewhat predictable. In Oklahoma, the base ingredients—a collision of warm and cool fronts—are particularly volatile: “Intensely moist air from the Gulf of Mexico will often collide with cool, dry air wafting down from Canada over the Rockies, and the two forces are further churned together by the jet stream.” When temperatures or moisture levels vary significantly, a supercell may—or may not—form, generating a tornado. A mile wide, with winds over 200 miles per hour, the May 20 tornado began “as nothing more than a wispy little funnel, dancing shyly between the clouds and the ground”; within minutes, it “morphed into a hulking beast devouring everything in its path”: houses, trucks, electrical wires, even grass. Though occasionally overheated, Bailey’s prose vividly evokes the tornado’s power and menace.
Storm chasers will find thrills in this tale of nature’s wrath.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42749-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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