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September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged in a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over six thousand people in what remains the greatest natural disaster in American history--and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devestating personal tragedy.
Using Cline's own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man's heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. Riveting, powerful, and unbearably suspenseful, Isaac's Storm is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets the great uncontrollable force of nature.
But if a major hurricane does menace the New England coast, Isaac's Storm will not be the most comfortable book to have by the bedside as the wind shrieks and the waves rise.
The storm in question - its designation as Isaac's is another question - is the hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, on Saturday, Sept. 8, 1900. It was a storm of truly frightful proportions, turning a thriving, bustling city into a wasteland of rubble in which were buried the bodies of as many as 8,000 of its residents.
Erik Larson's accomplishment is to have made this great-storm story a very human one - thanks to his use of the large number of survivors' accounts - without ignoring the hurricane itself.
The storm crossed Cuba on Sept. 4 and was predicted to turn north toward the Atlantic coast. Instead, it steered across the Gulf of Mexico and made landfall just south of Galveston. The conventional wisdom of the time held that Galveston's sloping offshore shelf would temper the force of storm-driven waves, and there are accounts of children playing in the surf just hours before the hurricane-force winds drove the sea over the beach and far into the city.
By early evening, Larson writes, ''the sea had erected an escarpment of wreckage three stories tall and several miles long'' that was ''so tall, so massive that it acted as a kind of seawall'' - except that as the waves shoved it forward, ''it scraped the city clean of all structures and all life.''
This is clearly more than ''Isaac's storm.'' Building the story around one character is a useful device, but perhaps it was done mainly as an (over-)reaction to the impersonality of Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm.'' True, Isaac Cline is an easily identifiable character, and there is a serious question about whether, as head of the weather bureau, he fatally underestimated the potential for destruction from a storm hitting Galveston. But curiously, the story seems to stall whenever Cline becomes the focus - and too often Larson has to pump up his central character with ''what was Isaac thinking'' speculation. And frankly, Larson's bit players too often upstage Cline.
Among the incidents that capture the physical and emotional impact of the storm surge is that experienced by merchant (and amateur meteorologist) Samuel O. Young. His house was six blocks in from the beachfront, and his family was safely out of town, so Young stayed, watching the storm's progress from his second-floor windows. Curious about ''a heavy thumping that seemed to come from a downstairs bedroom,'' he went to investigate. Looking down the stairwell, he saw that the water had risen almost to the top step. ''The heavy thudding ... had to be furniture. A bureau, perhaps, bumping against the ceiling as the water rose and fell.''
By that time, in the early evening, only one other house still stood in Young's immediate neighborhood: that of a family named Youens. As Young watched, he saw it ''begin a slow pirouette.'' In his account, ''Mr. Youens' house rose like a huge steamboat, was swept back and suddenly disappeared.'' Knowing that the parents and their two children had remained inside, he said, ''my feelings were indescribable as I saw them go.''
And there are dozens of other vividly recounted incidents that could be singled out to illustrate the dimensions of the story and Larson's skillful telling of it.
It is a tribute to his control of his material - and of his writing - that there is only one moment at which he seems to have allowed his emotional response to overtake the story.
''Suddenly,'' Larson writes, ''the prospect of watching their children die became very real'' for families trapped in their houses. ''Whom did you save? Did you seek to save one child, or try to save all, at the risk of ultimately saving none? ... And if you saved none, what then? How did you go on?''
The sophisticated reader may find the emotionalism unsettling, a lapse in literary judgment. But ultimately, as the accounts of just such situations multiply thumping like Mr. Young's furniture at the reader's consciousness - that series of questions universalizes the account of one storm in one place at one time. The storm, the place, the time, after all, could be here and now.
— Boston Globe
In a crucial scene in Isaac's Storm, Erik Larson's bestselling history of the 1900 Galveston hurricane, meteorologist Joseph Cline warns some residents that they should evacuate before a storm hits their town. But another meteorologist -- his older brother, Isaac -- insists they should stay. The debate takes place on Sept. 8, 1900 -- shortly before the hurricane slams into the thriving Texas town and kills thousands of people in a cataclysm that remains the most fatality-heavy natural disaster in U.S. history.
Isaac's Storm takes place in an era when the field of meteorology was just getting off the ground. While weather-watchers like Isaac and Joseph Cline had a strong faith in their scientific abilities, they obviously didn't have the technology that could have blessed their forecasts with more accuracy.
Despite his failings as a scientist, it is Isaac rather than his brother who has gone down in Galveston-area legend as the Paul Revere who warned residents to leave before the hurricane raged into town. Nearly two weeks after the storm, the New York Evening Sun noted that "the warnings which were sent out by Dr. [Isaac] Cline are said to have saved thousands of lives along the coast."
But in the new book's account, Isaac is an incompetent rather than a soothsayer, misreading the fatal portents in the atmosphere. Now Larson, a Time magazine contributor who started researching his book five years ago, has run into some local resistance to his revisionist take.
Meteorologist Lew Fincher, vice president of the Houston chapter of the American Meteorological Society, thinks Larson has made Isaac a scapegoat. Fincher defends Isaac's role in the hurricane: "I think he studied everything he could. He was going by the knowledge that they had with them in the bureau."
According to Isaac's Storm, the two brothers barely spoke after the storm; by the time they both died -- within a week of each other in 1955 -- they hadn't been in touch "for years." But Fincher says that he has read both brothers' journals and that Larson overdramatized their relationship: "I think that he was trying to come up with a personal conflict to make the book more human. I've read a lot on both of those guys, and there's nothing out of the ordinary that any brothers wouldn't have experienced."
According to Fincher, Larson neglected to read an account in a book that was published shortly after the storm, The Story of the Galveston Flood, in which the brothers are quoted speaking of each other quite warmly. The cold, stilted tone of their letters he shrugs off as a combination of their very formal Victorian higher education and their military background. On a scientific note, he takes exception to Larson's classification of the hurricane as a Category 5 storm: "I'd call it a 4, maybe a 3." (Nevertheless, he considers Larson's book "a great read.")
Larson, however, is adamant in his insistence that his reporting is dead on. "There's pretty good evidence that the legend is not completely accurate," he said on the phone from his Seattle home. "Most likely [Isaac] did go to the beach and warn some people -- but did he warn 6,000? I don't see how that is possible." Alluding to documents he found at the National Archives, he said that two accounts point to Isaac's telling some people to stay in Galveston.
As for the strain in the brothers' relationship, Larson says that he assumed it was common knowledge and insists that he had no authorial motive to bend the truth: "It would have been an equally good story if they hadn't have been rivals, but you've got to call them as you see them." Larson says that one formidable expert, Neil Frank (whom Fincher calls "the Babe Ruth of hurricanes"), mentioned the rivalry to him. When pressed for the source of his information about the epic silence between the brothers, he referred to Frank and to an article in the Southwest Quarterly. (Neither is cited in the book as a source for the information.) Larson maintains that he, like Fincher, read the journals of both men very closely and that the tension is unmistakable. According to Larson, although Joseph endured the storm with his brother, his lengthy account of it never mentions Isaac. "It's either funny or very tragic," Larson says.
As far as his classification of the storm, Larson concedes the controversy but stands by his reasoning. "Officially it was a 4," he says. "Having spent two and a half years of intense research on this storm, I'm convinced it was a 5. The bottom line is that no one can know for sure." (After all, nobody back then had Air Force planes to monitor oncoming storms.) Larson also says that he gave the manuscript to Hugh E. Willoughby, a leader in the field of hurricane research, and Willoughby had no problem with the classification. ("Any lingering errors are entirely my fault, not his," Larson's acknowledgment notes, using the standard formula.)
The meteorological journal Weatherwise cited a host of what it deemed factual errors in Isaac's Storm, which didn't prevent it from giving the book a rave review. Putting it in a class with Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air -- hugely popular books that have also been called into question for their accuracy -- Weatherwise calls Larson's narrative "reading at its best."
— Salon
"Isaac's Storm so fully swept me away into another place, another time that I didn't want it to end. I braced myself from the monstrous winds, recoiled in shock at the sight of flailing children floating by, and shook my head at the hubris of our scientists who were so convinced that they had the weather all figured out. Erik Larson's writing is luminous, the story absolutely gripping. If there is one book to read as we enter a new millennium, it's Isaac's Storm, a tale that reminds us that there are forces at work out there well beyond our control, and maybe even well beyond our understanding."
— Alex Kotlowitz, author of The Other Side of the River and There Are No Children Here
"There is electricity in these pages, from the crackling wit and intelligence of the prose to the thrillingly described terrors of natural mayhem and unprecedented destruction. Though brimming with the subtleties of human nature, the nuances of history, and the poetry of landscapes, Isaac's Storm still might best be described as a sheer page turner."
— Melissa Faye Greene, author of Praying for Sheetrock and The Temple Bombing
Do you hear anything about Galveston?
Willis L. Moore,
Chief, U.S. Weather Bureau
The Beach
September 8, 1900
Throughout the night of Friday, September 7, 1900, Isaac Monroe Cline found himself waking to a persistent sense of something gone wrong. It was the kind of feeling parents often experienced and one that no doubt had come to him when each of his three daughters was a baby. Each would cry, of course, and often for astounding lengths of time, tearing a seam not just through the Cline house but also, in that day of open windows and unlocked doors, through the dew-sequined peace of his entire neighborhood. On some nights, however, the children cried only long enough to wake him, and he would lie there heart-struck, wondering what had brought him back to the world at such an unaccustomed hour. Tonight that feeling returned.
Most other nights, Isaac slept soundly. He was a creature of the last turning of the centuries when sleep seemed to come more easily. Things were clear to him. He was loyal, a believer in dignity, honor, and effort. He taught Sunday school. He paid cash, a fact noted in a directory published by the Giles Mercantile Agency and meant to be held in strictest confidence. The small red book fit into a vest pocket and listed nearly all Galveston's established citizens--its police officers, bankers, waiters, clerics, tobacconists, undertakers, tycoons, and shipping agents--and rated them for credit-worthiness, basing this appraisal on secret reports filed anonymously by friends and enemies. An asterisk beside a name meant trouble, "Inquire at Office," and marred the fiscal reputations of such people as Joe Amando, tamale vendor; Noah Allen, attorney; Ida Cherry, widow; and August Rollfing, housepainter. Isaac Cline got the highest rating, a "B," for "Pays Well, Worthy of Credit." In November of 1893, two years after Isaac arrived in Galveston to open the Texas Section of the new U.S. Weather Bureau, a government inspector wrote: "I suppose there is not a man in the Service on Station Duty who does more real work than he. . . . He takes a remarkable degree of interest in his work, and has a great pride in making his station one of the best and most important in the country, as it is now."
Upon first meeting Isaac, men found him to be modest and self-effacing, but those who came to know him well saw a hardness and confidence that verged on conceit. A New Orleans photographer captured this aspect in a photograph that is so good, with so much attention to the geometries of composition and light, it could be a portrait in oil. The background is black; Isaac's suit is black. His shirt is the color of bleached bone. He has a mustache and goatee and wears a straw hat, not the rigid cake-plate variety, but one with a sweeping scimitar brim that imparts to him the look of a French painter or riverboat gambler. A darkness suffuses the photograph. The brim shadows the top of his face. His eyes gleam from the darkness. Most striking is the careful positioning of his hands. His right rests in his lap, gripping what could be a pair of gloves. His left is positioned in midair so that the diamond on his pinkie sparks with the intensity of a star.
There is a secret embedded in this photograph. For now, however, suffice it to say the portrait suggests vanity, that Isaac was aware of himself and how he moved through the day, and saw himself as something bigger than a mere recorder of rainfall and temperature. He was a scientist, not some farmer who gauged the weather by aches in a rheumatoid knee. Isaac personally had encountered and explained some of the strangest atmospheric phenomena a weatherman could ever hope to experience, but also had read the works of the most celebrated meteorologists and physical geographers of the nineteenth century, men like Henry Piddington, Matthew Fontaine Maury, William Redfield, and James Espy, and he had followed their celebrated hunt for the Law of Storms. He believed deeply that he understood it all.
He lived in a big time, astride the changing centuries. The frontier was still a living, vivid thing, with Buffalo Bill Cody touring his Wild West Show to sellout crowds around the globe, Bat Masterson a sportswriter in New Jersey, and Frank James opening the family ranch for tours at fifty cents a head. But a new America was emerging, one with big and global aspirations. Teddy Roosevelt, flanked by his Rough Riders, campaigned for the vice presidency. U.S. warships steamed to quell the Boxers. There was fabulous talk of a great American-built canal that would link the Atlantic to the Pacific, a task at which Vicomte de Lesseps and the French had so catastrophically failed. The nation in 1900 was swollen with pride and technological confidence. It was a time, wrote Sen. Chauncey Depew, one of the most prominent politicians of the age, when the average American felt "four-hundred-percent bigger" than the year before.
There was talk even of controlling the weather--of subduing hail with cannon blasts and igniting forest fires to bring rain.
In this new age, nature itself seemed no great obstacle.
Anonymous
Posted Sun Feb 21 00:00:00 EST 2010
I love to read history books, however some can be hard to get into. This is not the case with this book! I read it in less than a week. It was very well written and gave a gripping account of a horrible storm. It really makes you realize how lucky we are today to have advance hurricane warnings!
7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Fri Jul 06 00:00:00 EDT 2007
I couldn't help but read this once I saw it. My wifes grandfather survived the storm as in infant. He was was born in August of 1900 and the storm came the next month. His mother told him their two story home floated down the street with them in it. My mother in law gave me a pendulum clock that I am looking at. She said it floated in Angelo's restaurant. I can still see water stains on its face as I write this. I don't think I understood what people in my family knew about this event until I read Isaac's Storm. I go to Galveston and wonder why some many homes are being built on the beach.Don't they know what happened? It will happen sadly again. I survived Carla in the center of the storm in 1961 in Port Lavaca. I know what can happen. After Galveston and after New Orleans you would think others would know. They don't. Darrell Cameron Houston Resident
5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Tue Aug 18 00:00:00 EDT 2009
This was very well written with a great deal of historical research presented in a very readable, non-dry narrative. The book chronicles events leading up to and including accounts of the hurricane of 1900 that wiped out Galveston. It is seen in large part via the chief meteorologist there at the time. This is not the usual type of book I would read. I expected to be bored by the meteorology information, and though there was some in the first of the book I didn't find enthralling, it was worth reading to understand the whole picture. Once the actual hurricane accounts started, I couldn't put the book down! The 1900 hurricane in Galveston was a tragedy that could have been mitigated greatly in terms of massive loss of lives had only the warning signs been investigated. There was arrogance on the part of the main meteorologist in Galveston, and in addition there were also in-house political issues among U.S. weather service leaders and personnel that stifled communication or collaboration. The accounts of the survivors who lived through the hurricane are horrifying but riveting.
4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Mon Apr 28 00:00:00 EDT 2008
Isaac's Storm was a great book. It takes place in Galveston, TX on September 8th and 9th, 1900. There was a hurricane offcoast and Washington DC told Isaac Cline that it was no threat, it was great weather, so he believed them. But he saw the ocean get worse and worried. When he figured out that this was a bad hurricane, it was too late for many people. The city was destroyed and about 6000 people were dead, including his wife and kid. Issac carried it on his shoulders that it was his fault, that he was careless once, and a horrible hurricane hit. This book's message is that man's faliure to predict when, where, and how a storm will hit can lead to a horrible ending. Isaac's Storm has 6 chapters, each one leading up to the storm. Each one, telling a little bit more about this misunderstanding, and Isaac's training. This book is perfect for teenagers and up. It is a great weather adventure story. I love this book, I think that it has a great balance between the actual storm and it's effects on so many people and the people that try to prevent storms like the category 5 hurricane that hit Galveston.
4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Sat Dec 19 00:00:00 EST 2009
I Also Recommend:
I had always heard of this terrible hurricane and I wanted to read about the actual event. I did not expect this book to be so captivating and entertaining. The impending doom is an underlying current throughout the book. The author inserts many personal perspectives including the weather forecaster's family along with many other Galveston residents. The reader gets a visual and factual perspective of life at the turn of the century and the crude tools used to predict the weather. This lack of technology and lack of communication led to the deaths of over 10,000.
I recommend this book without any hesitation. The research is well done, the vision of life in 1900 and the unspeakable power of God's power is wonderfully presented by Mr. Larson.
3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Thu Aug 22 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Since I live in Galveston and having been here thru Ike, I found this book very vivid, emotional excellent!
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Sat Jan 28 00:00:00 EST 2012
Compelling and full of period details
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Thu Dec 08 00:00:00 EST 2011
This is story of a tragic event in American history. The book brought history to life and keeps you in engaged to the very end. This book made me appreciate weather stations even more.
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Fri Mar 07 00:00:00 EST 2014
I actually heard this in the audio version and had to have the book for myself! I was hooked from the beginning, anyone interested in history, this is a MUST READ!
Granx6
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Mon Sep 02 00:00:00 EDT 2013
I could hardly stop reading this book. It was touching and horrifying at the same time as Mr. Larson told the story of the deadly Galveston Hurricane. He is very good at telling a story from brief documented facts. I've enjoyed all of his books and would recommend any of them. I learn so much history while enjoying a good read.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Who would have thought a book about weather forecasting could be so interesting?? I enjoy books that tell stories of little-known events or people that were part of much larger stories in our history and this book does just that. Larson's style of story-telling kept me engaged from start to finish!
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Sat Sep 27 00:00:00 EDT 2014
Very interesting and compelling story of the hurricane and how it affected the area. Love how the author puts the story together.
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Posted Thu Sep 25 00:00:00 EDT 2014
Very interesting
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Posted Fri Sep 05 00:00:00 EDT 2014
The detail in this book is amazing and very interesting. I recommend it highly.
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Posted Sat Mar 08 00:00:00 EST 2014
Employee wanted
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Mon Jul 22 00:00:00 EDT 2013
This is an amazingly well researched book. My husband and I read it just as we were leaving for a week in Galveston, and it certainly added another dimension to out trip.
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Posted Sun May 26 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Epic storytelling about an historical storm.
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Sat Apr 13 00:00:00 EDT 2013
I really love all his books, but this is probably my favorite.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Hubris Meets Devastation and Leaves Us a Warning
For me, Erik Larson is a sure thing. I try to read something new he's written each year, as it usually helps me in my own occasional research, as his scholarship and approach are incredibly well-conceived. Isaac's Storm, of course is no different. Larson writes historical non-fiction with a voice as rousing and moving as the best fiction. He chooses subjects that illuminate unexpected parts of our culture and our collective consciousness, in unique ways.
Following on the recent devastation of parts of Long Island and New Jersey in Sandy's wake, it seemed the right time to read of the terrifying power of nature in the storm that laid waste Galveston, TX on the eve of the Twentieth Century. Larson meets the challenge of describing that heady time and the prevailing attitudes of the day in such clarity that the post-storm emptiness and confusion, resounded in my heart. I was equally repelled, terrified and deeply moved as the story of one man and the beginnings of the US Weather Service becomes a tragedy of unparalleled scope. It was a fast read, and one where I actually enjoyed reviewing and reading his footnotes and comments after completion.
Larson also touches briefly, on the fact that just as Americans felt they had harnessed nature to their own ends in 1900, we are also lulled into complacency today, as huge homes are built in barrier island communities all along our shores. His conclusion should stand as a powerful warning. But there are other warnings to be aware of.
My family and I used to have a favorite anchorage, to enjoy a weekend aboard. It lay in the wide, still harbor off of Watch Hill, RI. One day, walking ashore there, I chanced upon a monument to the losses of Napatree in the 1938 hurricane. I learned that a medium sized, shore community had once stood where, today, only a long sand strand of several miles remains. And the harbor we once enjoyed anchoring in so much? It became the grave of the entire town and many of its residents when the 1938 storm swept it clean. We need to keep their memory alive, and the memory of the lives lost in Galveston so that we might learn to respect what can happen when a weather pattern forms off West Africa at the end of Summer. Satellites images and computer-modeled storm forecasts can't save us if we tempt fate. No one can be that lucky forever.
Anonymous
Posted Sun Sep 23 00:00:00 EDT 2012
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Overview
September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged in a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over six thousand people in what remains the greatest natural disaster in ...