2013 read #46: Storm Kings by Lee Sandlin.

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.