Isaac's storm: a man, a time, and the deadliest hurricane in history

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The riveting true story of the Galveston hurricane of 1900, still the deadliest natural disaster in American history—from the acclaimed author of The Devil in the White City“A gripping account ... fascinating to its core, and all the more compelling for being true.” —The New York Times Book ReviewSeptember 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—and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devastating 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.

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ISBN
9780609602331
9781490648538
9780307874092
9780375708275
9780965043021

Table of Contents

From the Book - 1st ed.

Beach: September 8, 1900 --
ch. 1. Law of storms --
ch. 2. Serpent's coil --
ch. 3. Spectacle --
ch. 4. Cataclysm --
ch. 5. Strange news --
ch. 6. Haunted.

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Similar Titles From NoveList

NoveList provides detailed suggestions for titles you might like if you enjoyed this book. Suggestions are based on recommendations from librarians and other contributors.
These books have the genres "life stories -- facing adversity -- disasters and tragedies" and "nature writing -- natural disaster"; and the subjects "floods," "survival (after hurricanes)," and "natural disasters."
These books have the genres "life stories -- facing adversity -- disasters and tragedies" and "nature writing -- natural disaster"; and the subjects "floods," "survival (after hurricanes)," and "natural disasters."
These books offer compelling accounts of the 1900 hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas. Isaac's Storm emphasizes the role of the scientist who predicted the storm, while Storm of the Century provides meteorological details while also focusing on ordinary Galveston citizens. -- Katherine Johnson
These fascinating, thoroughly researched histories delve into the science of natural disasters. The gigantic Alaska earthquake of 1964 (The Great Quake) and the Galveston hurricane of 1900 (Isaac's Storm) devastated those regions, but they also contributed to better scientific understanding. -- Katherine Johnson
No ordinary heroes: 8 doctors, 30 nurses, 7,000 prisoners, and a category 5 hurricane - Inglese, Demaree
These books have the genres "life stories -- facing adversity -- disasters and tragedies" and "nature writing -- natural disaster"; and the subjects "hurricanes," "survival (after hurricanes)," and "united states history."
Isaac's Storm and The Perfect Storm are compelling stories about natural disasters. These dark books talk about the storms themselves and the destruction they wrought, as well as the effects on the people involved. -- Katherine Johnson
Anecdotes and oral histories shape these dramatic narratives of the 1889 Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood (Tide) and the 1900 Galveston, Texas hurricane (Storm). Both books convey the harrowing impact of natural disasters -- and human error -- in precipitating mass casualties. -- Kaitlin Conner
These books have the appeal factors cinematic, and they have the genres "life stories -- facing adversity -- disasters and tragedies" and "nature writing -- natural disaster"; and the subjects "hurricanes," "floods," and "survival (after hurricanes)."
These books have the genres "life stories -- facing adversity -- disasters and tragedies" and "nature writing -- natural disaster"; and the subjects "hurricanes," "floods," and "survival (after hurricanes)."
These books have the appeal factors cinematic, and they have the genres "life stories -- facing adversity -- disasters and tragedies" and "nature writing -- natural disaster"; and the subjects "floods," "survival (after hurricanes)," and "natural disasters."
These books have the appeal factors cinematic and richly detailed, and they have the genres "life stories -- facing adversity -- disasters and tragedies" and "nature writing -- natural disaster"; and the subjects "floods," "natural disasters," and "earthquakes."
Sudden sea: the Great Hurricane of 1938 - Scotti, R. A.
Like Isaac's Storm, Sudden Sea uses eyewitness accounts to create a gripping history of a devastating hurricane. This one, a surprise storm in 1938, blazed a trail of death and destruction across seven Northeastern states. -- Shauna Griffin

Similar Authors From NoveList

NoveList provides detailed suggestions for other authors you might want to read if you enjoyed this book. Suggestions are based on recommendations from librarians and other contributors.
These history and biography writers share a descriptive, thorough, journalistic style. Both create literary narratives about people and events showing significant developments in combining philosophy and practical science, ethics, and technology. Both are sobering and thought-provoking, and Erik Larson tackles even more disturbing subjects with an often suspenseful tone. -- NoveList Contributor
Both Erik Larson and David King examine obscure tidbits of history against dramatic backdrops, thus providing new perspectives. Their work is gripping, accessible, and thoroughly researched; their writing vivid and clear. -- Autumn Winters
Fascinating subjects and memorable characters are fully explored in the compelling, richly detailed books of Charlotte Gray and Erik Larson. Whether they are dabbling in historical true crime or providing much-needed context for the lives of political figures, both authors excel at illuminating history's forgotten moments. -- Catherine Coles
Although Erik Larson's bestselling true-crime books are historical, they are no less compelling than Ann Rule's fact-filled modern-day stories. Larson, who earned his street credentials as a journalist covering homicide and other crimes, has, like Rule, won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar for Best Fact Crime. -- Dawn Towery
Simon Winchester recreates history's storylines, uncovering the details and characters that may have been lurking in the shadows, all in an attempt to brighten our understanding of the world around us today. He adds interesting and unusual topics to the field of narrative nonfiction for which Erik Larson is so well known. -- NoveList Contributor
Both Erik Larson and Paul Collins excel at face-paced historic true crime narratives in which a horrific murder exemplifies key issues of the time in which it occurred; the strong personalities of key figures, prevailing social tensions, and mistaken assumptions about the suspect(s) or the victim(s) frequently influence events. -- NoveList Contributor
Erik Larson and Mike Dash use engrossing narratives to plunge readers into particular historical landscapes. Larson has a propensity for digression into illuminating side discussions, and Dash's work also exhibits this tendency, ensuring its appeal for those who love to learn by serendipity. -- NoveList Contributor
In narrative nonfiction at its finest, these authors write lucid, compelling accounts of grave danger, profound betrayal, and systemic horror. Their careful research, coupled with a fine sense of drama, brings the recent and the distant past sharply to life. -- NoveList Contributor
Erik Larson and Daniel Stashower craft clever portraits of historical personalities and their times. Using vivid description and memorable characterization, their narrative nonfiction sheds new light on obscure and even well-known people and events. -- NoveList Contributor
Journalists Erik Larson and Jon Krakauer share a straightforward writing style, intensity, and use of detail in their books about contemporary and historical events and characters. Krakauer focuses more on contemporary events, but he and Larson share a number of themes, including murder and man-versus-nature. -- NoveList Contributor
These authors' works have the appeal factors richly detailed, and they have the genre "biographies."
These authors' works have the genre "true crime"; and the subject "serial murderers."

Published Reviews

Choice Review

Fascinating yet ominous, Larson's book reads as if it were a firsthand account of the deadliest storm to hit the US. (The world has experienced worse storms, many near the Bay of Bengal and also in China and Japan, but this book offers a historically based account of what it must have been like to be in the very middle of a storm.) Larson begins with a basic meteorological account, sprinkled with the history of weather service, an account of past disasters, and the biography of Isaac Cline, the person in charge of the weather office in Galveston during the 1900 hurricane. A riveting book, with appalling accounts of the approaching storm and its subsequent effects, it draws the reader into the excitement and fears experienced during a life-threatening event. The account emphasizes that water is a bigger threat than wind, although pieces of debris flying at more than 100 miles per hour (wind velocity devices ceased to work above 100 mph) kept people from seeking safer havens. Any coastal residents who take this book to heart would certainly evacuate when a storm is imminent; everyone should have a plan for safety from every type of emergency. Recommended for everyone. A. E. Staver; Northern Illinois University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
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Booklist Review

This engrossing disaster book concerns the Galveston hurricane of 1900, still by far the high-water mark in American natural catastrophes. Like the Johnstown Flood that occurred 10 years earlier (see David McCullough's Johnstown Flood, 1987), nature's wrath was mightily aided by man's obliviousness. Larson highlights two central actors in the drama: the hurricane itself, beginning with its origin in Saharan westerly winds, and Isaac Cline, the Weather Bureau's sentinel in Galveston. Setting the stage, Larson depicts a wealthy, optimistic Galveston, unconcerned by its site on a barrier island scant feet above sea level, blithely ignorant of the storm heading its way. En route to destiny, the hurricane previously walloped Cuba, but a Cuban forecaster's intuitive prediction that Texas was the next landfall was not permitted to be telegraphed out by the Weather Bureau's man in Havana. Skeptical of intuition, he believed in meteorological facts, which convinced him the storm was fizzling out east of Florida. For the main act, Larson reconstructs Isaac Cline's day on 8 September 1900 and ratchets up the tension as clouds gather, the effective device being the sequence of perceptions that disaster was inescapable. Were the rolling waves worrisome? If not, the splintering of the boardwalk concentrated Galvestonians' attention--but, by then, the single railroad out was cut. A further mark of Larson's depth as a writer is his ambivalence about Cline, who may not have acted as heroically as depicted in his own memoir. Although the subject is grim, this telling is a deftly told fable of folly and fate. --Gilbert Taylor

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
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Publisher's Weekly Review

Torqued by drama and taut with suspense, this absorbing narrative of the 1900 hurricane that inundated Galveston, Tex., conveys the sudden, cruel power of the deadliest natural disaster in American history. Told largely from the perspective of Isaac Cline, the senior U.S. Weather Bureau official in Galveston at the time, the story considers an era when "the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself." As barometers plummet and wind gauges are plucked from their moorings, Larson (Lethal Passage) cuts cinematically from the eerie "eyewall" of the hurricane to the mundane hubbub of a lunchroom moments before it capitulates to the arriving winds, from the neat pirouette of Cline's house amid rising waters to the bridge of the steamship Pensacola, tossed like flotsam on the roiling seas. Most intriguingly, Larson details the mistakes that led bureau officials to dismiss warnings about the storm, which killed over 6000 and destroyed a third of the island city. The government's weather forecasting arm registered not only temperature and humidity but also political climate, civic boosterism and even sibling rivalries. America's patronizing stance toward Cuba, for instance, shut down forecasts from Cuban meteorologists, who had accurately predicted the Galveston storm's course and true scale, even as U.S. weather officials issued mollifying bulletins calling for mere rain and high winds. Larson expertly captures the power of the storm itself and the ironic, often catastrophic consequences of the unpredictable intersection of natural force and human choice. Major ad/promo; author tour; simultaneous Random House audio; foreign rights sold in Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan and the U.K. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
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School Library Journal Review

YA-Larson has brought together powerful elements to create one of the most memorable of the "natural disaster" docudramas that have come out recently. Meteorologists within the U.S. Weather Bureau at the turn of the 20th century had become so confident of their own forecasting abilities that they dismissed with irritation troubling weather reports out of Cuba. In a burgeoning port city like Galveston, TX, in 1900, the idea that severe damage could be done by a hurricane seemed preposterous. Following several threads at once, Larson creates a likable character in the real-life weatherman Isaac Cline, tracing his career as a meteorologist. A tropical depression takes on an ominous life of its own as it thrashes its way through the Caribbean and up through the Gulf of Mexico. The town of Galveston becomes one of the major characters in the story. Poignant details and sweeping narrative create a book that is hard to put down even though the outcome is a well-known historical fact: more than 6000 dead and an entire city devastated. At the same time, Larson chronicles a critical period of history for the National Weather Bureau. The blatant errors in judgment led to changes within that federal agency. More than anything, this is a gripping and heartbreaking story of what happens when arrogance meets the immutable forces of nature.-Cynthia J. Rieben, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Library Journal Review

On September 8, 1900, the seaside town of Galveston, TX, was struck by a storm so severe that over 8000 people perished, making it the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history. Forecasters in Cuba warned U.S. Weather Bureau officials of the approaching hurricane; why weren't they listening? As in his other works (e.g., Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun), Larson delves deeply into this tragedy by combining scientific research and social commentary with the personalized anecdotes of survivors. The narrative focuses on Isaac Cline (hence the title), an early professional weatherman based in Galveston who discounted the strength of the coming storm and endured great personal loss once it struck. Scientists and historians alike will find interest in this text, which depicts early techniques of meteorological research with the related conflicts between governmental agencies as well as insight into the overall societal values of the era. General readers will be compelled to continue as Larson reveals in heartbreaking details the storm's devastation: homes destroyed by ocean water driven by 200-mile-an-hour gusts of wind; men struggling to save their families while others pushed children away from protective shelter in order to save themselves; and, finally, the survivors frantically searching for their loved ones among the corpses buried in mud. This unforgettable work is highly recommended for both public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/99.]ÄTrisha Stevenson, New York Univ. Medical Ctr. Sch. of Medicine Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Kirkus Book Review

There is bad weather, and there are 100-year storms. Then there are meteorological events. In September 1900, one of the latter visited Galveston, Tex., and ate the city alive. Larson tells the story with (at times overnourished) brio. The Isaac in Larson's (Lethal Passage: How the Travels of a Single Handgun Expose the Roots of America's Gun Crisis, 1994) title is Isaac Cline: head meteorologist of the Galveston station of the US Weather Bureau in 1900, a man who thought he had the drop on weather systems because he had data, and from data he could predict the meteorological future. But, as Larson shows, from Philo of Byzantium in 300 b.c. to the talking weatherheads of today, forecasting the weather has always been a "black and dangerous art." When Cline blithely stated that Galveston's vulnerability to extreme weather was "an absurd delusion," he was inviting trouble, and it came calling. A series of administrative snafus and ignored warnings from Cuba found the city unprepared for the monster rogue hurricane. The air turned wild and gray, a storm surge swept over the city, the wind became "a thousands little devils, shrieking and whistling," said a survivor. It is now thought to have topped 150 mph. "Slate fractured skulls and removed limbs. Venomous snakes spiraled upward into trees occupied by people. A rocket of timber killed a horse in mid-gallop." It's estimated that 8,000 people died, and Cline was not decorated for his brilliant forecasting by a grateful city government. Larson paints a withering portrait of the early Weather Bureau and offers a wild and woolly reconstruction of the storm, full of gripping anecdotal accounts told with flair, even if he overplays the portents, sapping their menace and turning them into a melodrama most often accompanied by trembling piano keys. Cline saw himself as "a scientist, not some farmer who gauged the weather by aches in his rheumatoid knee." He should have listened to his bones. Larson captures his ignominy, and the storm in its fury. (Author tour) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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Booklist Reviews

This engrossing disaster book concerns the Galveston hurricane of 1900, still by far the high-water mark in American natural catastrophes. Like the Johnstown Flood that occurred 10 years earlier (see David McCullough's Johnstown Flood, 1987), nature's wrath was mightily aided by man's obliviousness. Larson highlights two central actors in the drama: the hurricane itself, beginning with its origin in Saharan westerly winds, and Isaac Cline, the Weather Bureau's sentinel in Galveston. Setting the stage, Larson depicts a wealthy, optimistic Galveston, unconcerned by its site on a barrier island scant feet above sea level, blithely ignorant of the storm heading its way. En route to destiny, the hurricane previously walloped Cuba, but a Cuban forecaster's intuitive prediction that Texas was the next landfall was not permitted to be telegraphed out by the Weather Bureau's man in Havana. Skeptical of intuition, he believed in meteorological facts, which convinced him the storm was fizzling out east of Florida. For the main act, Larson reconstructs Isaac Cline's day on 8 September 1900 and ratchets up the tension as clouds gather, the effective device being the sequence of perceptions that disaster was inescapable. Were the rolling waves worrisome? If not, the splintering of the boardwalk concentrated Galvestonians' attention--but, by then, the single railroad out was cut. A further mark of Larson's depth as a writer is his ambivalence about Cline, who may not have acted as heroically as depicted in his own memoir. Although the subject is grim, this telling is a deftly told fable of folly and fate. ((Reviewed June 1 & 15, 1999)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews

Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews
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Library Journal Reviews

For his latest, Larson (author most recently of Lethal Passage, about the gun industry) draws on the diaries of Isaac Cline, who was chief observer for the Federal Weather Bureau in Galveston, TX, when a ferocious hurricane hit on September 8, 1900, leaving 10,000 dead. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
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Library Journal Reviews

On September 8, 1900, the seaside town of Galveston, TX, was struck by a storm so severe that over 8000 people perished, making it the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history. Forecasters in Cuba warned U.S. Weather Bureau officials of the approaching hurricane; why weren't they listening? As in his other works (e.g., Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun), Larson delves deeply into this tragedy by combining scientific research and social commentary with the personalized anecdotes of survivors. The narrative focuses on Isaac Cline (hence the title), an early professional weatherman based in Galveston who discounted the strength of the coming storm and endured great personal loss once it struck. Scientists and historians alike will find interest in this text, which depicts early techniques of meteorological research with the related conflicts between governmental agencies as well as insight into the overall societal values of the era. General readers will be compelled to continue as Larson reveals in heartbreaking details the storm's devastation: homes destroyed by ocean water driven by 200-mile-an-hour gusts of wind; men struggling to save their families while others pushed children away from protective shelter in order to save themselves; and, finally, the survivors frantically searching for their loved ones among the corpses buried in mud. This unforgettable work is highly recommended for both public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/99.]ATrisha Stevenson, New York Univ. Medical Ctr. Sch. of Medicine Lib. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
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Publishers Weekly Reviews

Torqued by drama and taut with suspense, this absorbing narrative of the 1900 hurricane that inundated Galveston, Tex., conveys the sudden, cruel power of the deadliest natural disaster in American history. Told largely from the perspective of Isaac Cline, the senior U.S. Weather Bureau official in Galveston at the time, the story considers an era when "the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself." As barometers plummet and wind gauges are plucked from their moorings, Larson (Lethal Passage) cuts cinematically from the eerie "eyewall" of the hurricane to the mundane hubbub of a lunchroom moments before it capitulates to the arriving winds, from the neat pirouette of Cline's house amid rising waters to the bridge of the steamship Pensacola, tossed like flotsam on the roiling seas. Most intriguingly, Larson details the mistakes that led bureau officials to dismiss warnings about the storm, which killed over 6000 and destroyed a third of the island city. The government's weather forecasting arm registered not only temperature and humidity but also political climate, civic boosterism and even sibling rivalries. America's patronizing stance toward Cuba, for instance, shut down forecasts from Cuban meteorologists, who had accurately predicted the Galveston storm's course and true scale, even as U.S. weather officials issued mollifying bulletins calling for mere rain and high winds. Larson expertly captures the power of the storm itself and the ironic, often catastrophic consequences of the unpredictable intersection of natural force and human choice. Major ad/promo; author tour; simultaneous Random House audio; foreign rights sold in Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan and the U.K. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Publishers Weekly Reviews

Copyright 1999 Publishers Weekly Reviews
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School Library Journal Reviews

YA-Larson has brought together powerful elements to create one of the most memorable of the "natural disaster" docudramas that have come out recently. Meteorologists within the U.S. Weather Bureau at the turn of the 20th century had become so confident of their own forecasting abilities that they dismissed with irritation troubling weather reports out of Cuba. In a burgeoning port city like Galveston, TX, in 1900, the idea that severe damage could be done by a hurricane seemed preposterous. Following several threads at once, Larson creates a likable character in the real-life weatherman Isaac Cline, tracing his career as a meteorologist. A tropical depression takes on an ominous life of its own as it thrashes its way through the Caribbean and up through the Gulf of Mexico. The town of Galveston becomes one of the major characters in the story. Poignant details and sweeping narrative create a book that is hard to put down even though the outcome is a well-known historical fact: more than 6000 dead and an entire city devastated. At the same time, Larson chronicles a critical period of history for the National Weather Bureau. The blatant errors in judgment led to changes within that federal agency. More than anything, this is a gripping and heartbreaking story of what happens when arrogance meets the immutable forces of nature.-Cynthia J. Rieben, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
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