Washington Post • 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2020 Finalist • Kirkus Prize for NonfictionKirkus Reviews • Best Nonfiction Books of 2020Library Journal • Best Science & Technology Books of 2020Booklist • 10 Top Sci-Tech Books of 2020New York Times Book Review • Editor's Choice
With A Furious Sky, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin tells the history of America itself through its five-hundred-year battle with the fury of hurricanes.
Hurricanes menace North America from June through November every year, each as powerful as 10,000 nuclear bombs. These megastorms will likely become more intense as the planet continues to warm, yet we too often treat them as local disasters and TV spectacles, unaware of how far-ranging their impact can be. As best-selling historian Eric Jay Dolin contends, we must look to our nation’s past if we hope to comprehend the consequences of the hurricanes of the future.
With A Furious Sky, Dolin has created a vivid, sprawling account of our encounters with hurricanes, from the nameless storms that threatened Columbus’s New World voyages to the destruction wrought in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria. Weaving a story of shipwrecks and devastated cities, of heroism and folly, Dolin introduces a rich cast of unlikely heroes, such as Benito Vines, a nineteenth-century Jesuit priest whose innovative methods for predicting hurricanes saved countless lives, and puts us in the middle of the most devastating storms of the past, none worse than the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed at least 6,000 people, the highest toll of any natural disaster in American history.
Dolin draws on a vast array of sources as he melds American history, as it is usually told, with the history of hurricanes, showing how these tempests frequently helped determine the nation’s course. Hurricanes, it turns out, prevented Spain from expanding its holdings in North America beyond Florida in the late 1500s, and they also played a key role in shifting the tide of the American Revolution against the British in the final stages of the conflict. As he moves through the centuries, following the rise of the United States despite the chaos caused by hurricanes, Dolin traces the corresponding development of hurricane science, from important discoveries made by Benjamin Franklin to the breakthroughs spurred by the necessities of the World War II and the Cold War.
Yet after centuries of study and despite remarkable leaps in scientific knowledge and technological prowess, there are still limits on our ability to predict exactly when and where hurricanes will strike, and we remain terribly vulnerable to the greatest storms on earth. A Furious Sky is, ultimately, a story of a changing climate, and it forces us to reckon with the reality that as bad as the past has been, the future will probably be worse, unless we drastically reimagine our relationship with the planet.
Winner of the Writers' League of Texas Book Awards Finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas
Book PrizeFrom the front lines of the fracking debate, a “field philosopher” explores one of our most divisive technologies.When philosophy professor Adam Briggle moved to ...
A Miscellany, confined to a private edition for decades, sheds further light on the prodigious
vision and imagination of the most inventive poet of the twentieth century: E.E. Cummings.Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, E. E. Cummings’s groundbreaking ...
An Irish Times Best Book of the Year Longlisted for the Bread and Roses Award
for Radical PublishingSets Ireland's post-1916 history in its global and human context, to brilliant effect. Neil Hegarty, Irish Times Books of the Year 2015The Irish ...
With surprising tales of vicious mutineers, imperial riches, and high-seas intrigue, Black Flags, Blue Waters
is “rumbustious enough for the adventure-hungry” (Peter Lewis, San Francisco Chronicle). Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals ...
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Buzzfeed, San Francisco Chronicle, and
Publishers Weekly Winner of the Rome Prize (John Guare Writer’s Fund)“This remarkable memoir is written with extraordinary care, intelligence, and honesty.... In short, it’s fully ...
“A powerful argument, swept along by Katznelson’s robust prose and the imposing scholarship that lies
behind it.”Kevin Boyle, New York Times Book Review A work that “deeply reconceptualizes the New Deal and raises countless provocative questions” (David Kennedy), Fear Itself ...
An audacious and concrete proposal…Half-Earth completes the 86-year-old Wilson’s valedictory trilogy on the human animal
and our place on the planet. Jedediah Purdy, New RepublicIn his most urgent book to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and world-renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson ...
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice SelectionRiffing on cats and Brexit, the Royals
and the annoyances of aging, the nonagenarian Jan Morris delights with her wickedly hilarious first-ever diary collection.Celebrated as the “greatest descriptive writer of her time” ...