Isaac’s Storm: The Drowning of Galveston – 8 September 1900
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Product Description
Read by the leader
3 cassettes, approx. 5 hours
Now a New York Times bestseller, Isaac’s Storm is the superb narrative of the extreme hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, on a late summer day in 1900, leaving at least 8,000 people dead. On that day, a wall of water surged across the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the burgeoning city of Galveston. The nameless hurricane remains the deadliest natural dissaster in American history, its final toll greater than the combined tolls of the Johnstown Flood and the Fantastic San Francisco Earthquake of 1906– yet the event has all but dissappeared from natural memory.
Isaac Cline, one of the first professional weathermen emplyed by the government, has gone on record as declaring that no storm could hurt Galveston. Such fears, he wrote, were “an absurd delusion.” By the time the hellish event was over, Cline would see whole parts of the city scraped clean of all structures and all life, and would himself suffer an unbearable loss.
The additional main character is the storm itself. Issac’s Storm tracks the hurrican from its birth as a tiny plume of warm air over Africa, through its journey across the ocean as it drinks in vast amounts of energy, to its arrival at the unsuspecting city. The audiobook describes how the city, especially its children, welcomed the storm and the fantastic deep-ocean swells that it cast upon their beach–until extraordinary things started to take place.
Isaac’s Storm is based on our latest understanding of the physics and meteorology of hurricanes, on Cline’s own proper reports and detailed personal account of the storm, as well as the recollections of scores of additional witnesses. It is an unforgettable and timely tale of the conflict between human hubris and the last fantastic uncontrollable force–a cautionary tale for the millennium.Amazon.com Review
Reading in his signature dispassionate style, narrator Edward Herrmann brings an eerie cool to this powerful chronicle of the deadliest storm ever to hit the United States–a huge and terribly destructive hurricane that struck land near Galveston, Texas in September of 1900. Leader Erik Larson re-makes the events leading up to the disaster in astonishing detail, tracing the thoughts and actions of Isaac Cline, a scientist with America’s burgeoning U.S. Weather Bureau. Cline’s unwavering confidence–”In an age of scientific certainty one could not allow one’s judgment to be clouded…”–blinds the meteorologist to the deadly attack about to be unleashed. Herrmann’s calculated performance reflects the impending doom and dangers inherent to an unquestioned and absolute faith in science. (Running time: 5 hours, 3 cassettes) –George Laney
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Now if it had been available on the kindle, I may have liked it more.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Geez, I could even get through two chapters. It’s like reading a poem. ah, it’s dreadful.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
To this day I get mad when I reflect of what this writer did with a tragedy that needed no bluff and puff. Maybe his editors urged him to “take a point of view.” Maybe not. The point is, Erik Larson is like a parasite that attaches itself to something larger and feeds off it for as long as it can.
All Larson did was take Moby Dick and the Titanic, mix it up a bit with “The Perfect Storm” and he cooked up this putrid excuse for a book just in time for its 100th anniversary. Oh wow.
Larson pitted poor Isaac against a storm he had no way in hell of knowing was coming. In doing so, he attempted to make Isaac “the silly mortal” and the storm “the will of God or scenery” or whatever it is man has no control over. Larson attempted to write an epic at the expence of Isaac. He tried to turn it into the “Titanic”…. The Manufacturing era against scenery….And it makes me want to vomit that he managed to sell the thought and the book to so many people.
I despise this book because the writer wrote it just to make some money or to make his name anyway he could. He was not right to the history and he hurt himself by being too keen to fall into the slime.
This book is nothing but a titanic want-a-be in the midst of an imperfect storm.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I can’t judge the reviews I’ve seen and am forced to chime in to warn persons who expect _Issac’s Storm_ to provide the thrill and grip that _The Perfect Storm_ did — not even close.
While the fact that so much of this book — especially the climactic storm itself — is nearly entirely the imagination of the leader. This, in itself, isn’t the weakest link of the text (keeping in mind that the same final moments of _The Perfect Storm_ are also imagined… though Junger is kind enough to clearly point this out). The weakest link is the writing and structure which make the plodding pace and frequent diversion to filler unbearable. Yes, understanding the weather bureau politics is interesteding as well as the history of storm prediction is key and intersting… so why is the sum of the book such a drag? Hmm… could be the third-rate writing.
Read with low expectations.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Being from Galveston, and having read every book around on the 1900 storm, let me advise you to get ANY one of the others. You will find any one of them a much better read.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5