Storm Kings: The Untold History of America's First Tornado Chasers by Lee Sandlin
276 pages
Published 2013
Read from April 11 to April 13
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Long
stretches of my formative years were spent on the Great Plains.
Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, Kansas, eastern Colorado... then in later
years eastern New Mexico, Nebraska, South Dakota. I'll spare you the
usual romantic landscape cliches and truisms. I will say that, for years
and years, I've been enchanted by the idea of the Plains before the
plow and the railroad, when the vast sweep of grass and riverside
cottonwood swayed and mussed and crackled in the spring and summer
storms. Storms intoxicate me; their wildness makes me feel weightless.
The image of massive squalls and tornadic cells roaring across an
unbroken land is an altar scene in my brain's atavistic pantheist
temple.
This book is at its best when describing the storms
observed beyond the limits of contemporary science and cultivation.
Sandlin's prose is direct and unadorned but winningly fluid,
establishing the tension and terror of the moment with an ease most
technothriller authors would envy. Sadly, there are only a handful of
such episodes in this book. Much of its length is taken up with more
historically substantive (but far less interesting) affairs of feuding
scientists and army officers. This is a self-proclaimed history of storm
chasers, after all, not storms.
That flaw is endemic to modern science literature, though, so I can't criticize Storm Kings
unduly for it. It's what people seem to want in their natural history
books; I'm some weird outlier, wanting more science and less
personality. For what it is, Storm Kings is pretty great.
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