A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes

by Eric Jay Dolin

Overview

Washington Post • 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2020
Finalist • Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
Kirkus Reviews • Best Nonfiction Books of 2020
Library Journal • Best Science & Technology Books of 2020
Booklist • 10 Top Sci-Tech Books of 2020
New 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631495274
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	413,208
Product dimensions:	9.40(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Eric Jay Dolin is the best-selling author of numerous works in maritime history, including Black Flags, Blue Waters and Leviathan. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, he now lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family.

Table of Contents

Extracts (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian) xi

Author's Notes xiii

Introduction xv

Chapter 1 A New and Violent World 1

Chapter 2 The Law of Storms 25

Chapter 3 Seeing into the Future 48

Chapter 4 Obliterated 77

Chapter 5 Death and Destruction in the Sunshine State 107

Chapter 6 The Great Hurricane of 1938 155

Chapter 7 Into, Over, and Under the Maelstrom 179

Chapter 8 A Rogues' Gallery 224

Epilogue Stormy Weather Ahead 299

Tables of Costliest Hurricanes 307

Acknowledgments 311

Notes 313

Select Bibliography 371

Illustration Credits 375

Index 377

Editorial Reviews

…[a] lively chronicle of five tempestuous centuries…Where A Furious Sky is most compelling is in its often harrowing details. It's filled with haunting personal stories.

The New York Times Book Review - Elizabeth Kolbert

03/09/2020

Historian Dolin (Black Flags, Blue Waters) delivers a fast-paced and informative history of American hurricanes from the 16th century through the 2017 season, when a record-setting three storms made landfall. Though Dolin’s question of “how we can learn to survive and adapt” to hurricanes in the era of climate change doesn’t receive deep analysis, the book successfully documents the impact of storms such as the 1900 Galveston Hurricane (in which an estimated 8,000–10,000 people died) and the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane, which killed hundreds of WWI veterans building the Overseas Highway in the Florida Keys. Milestones in the scientific understanding of hurricanes include Father Benito Viñes’s observational studies in 19th-century Cuba and the U.S. military’s “Hurricane Hunter” flights, which began in WWII and employed new radar technology to capture real-time data from inside storms; the information was eventually used to create computer models to predict hurricane behavior. Dolin also explains hurricane naming conventions and credits Dan Rather’s 1961 Hurricane Carla broadcasts, which showed radar images of the storm, with changing how they’re reported. Packed with intriguing miscellanea, this accessible chronicle serves as a worthy introduction to the subject. Readers will be awed by the power of these storms and the wherewithal of people to recover from them. Agent: Russell Galen, The Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"The hurricane book to end all hurricane books."

Les Standiford

"A delightful blend of science, history, and masterful storytelling. Each of Dolin’s storm stories carries its own horrifying details and historical significance. A Furious Sky puts Dolin in the lofty company of Nathaniel Philbrick and Lincoln Paine among the most important, and downright entertaining, chroniclers of American maritime history."

Peter Houlahan

"You can’t really understand hurricanes without knowing their history. Eric Jay Dolin brings America’s great hurricanes alive with rich stories about the storms and the people whose lives they changed forever. Understanding our hurricane history gives hurricane science depth and meaning. This is a hurricane book for everyone."

Bryan Norcross

"The big blows of centuries far and near have long deserved our attention and never more than today. As Eric Jay Dolin reminds us, hurricanes have been pivot points in the course of human history. Now, they are catapulting us toward our future, underscoring the compelling nature of A Furious Sky, which in rigor and scope is as formidable as the weather outside."

Jack Davis

"[A] lively chronicle of five tempestuous centuries . . . Where A Furious Sky is most compelling is in its often harrowing details. It’s filled with haunting personal stories."

New York Times Book Review - Elizabeth Kolbert

"A Furious Sky is an epic narrative of the most significant hurricanes that have affected the United States. It is a fascinating book that weaves together history, science, policy, political fallout, and the inevitable human drama of hurricanes. Gripping and entertaining, A Furious Sky is a worthy addition to the literature on these great storms."

Lourdes B. Avilés

"Fascinating and heart-wrenching.... Following the science, Dolin soberly concludes: 'Hurricanes of the future will most likely be worse than those of the past."

Washington Post - Michael Taube

"[A Furious Sky] is a wonderfully researched and vividly written testament to the tragedy, suffering, and science that have given rise to our still-limited understanding of these ferocious storms."

WoodenBoat Magazine - Matt Murphy

"[A Furious Sky is] ultra readable maritime history."

Boston Globe - Lauren Daley

"This is a compelling fact-and anecdote-filled story of the most dramatic storms to have stunned and sometimes fractured America’s coastal communities. But it is also a riveting foretelling of our future as the most destructive hurricanes in the past five centuries become commonplace. A Furious Sky joins that short list of books that are both must-reads and armchair page-turners."

Tom Clavin

"[T]his compelling book is much more than a meteorological history, it is a remarkably human story of people struggling with nature at its fiercest and the myriad ways hurricanes have affected the course of human events. . . . Many of [these] true tales of survival and loss will tug at the readers’ heartstrings as Dolin makes them vivid and memorable."

James Pekoll

"A riveting mix of natural science, institutional history and human experience. All in a great read."

H. W. Brands

05/01/2020

Dolin (Leviathan) continues his series of popular histories with nautical or coastal themes with this exploration of hurricanes in the United States, deftly weaving together tales of tragedy, heroism, and scientific progress from colonial times until the present. Focusing on major storms and their impacts on the history of the United States, he draws from contemporaneous accounts to evoke the drama and power of these destructive storms. Meteorological advancements in our understanding of how hurricane storm systems form, grow, and travel as well as improvements in tracking and predictions have resulted in lower fatality rates, but growing population centers along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts have also meant increases in economic devastation. Many of the historic storms have entire books dedicated to them, but Emanuel's High Winds is the only similar comprehensive recent work on this topic, though its approach to the meteorological aspects is much more equation- and graph-heavy. A final chapter discusses the possible ramifications of global warming on hurricane formation, intensity, and impact. VERDICT Weather watchers, science buffs, and social historians will enjoy this history of the hurricane both as a chronology and for the individual tales of surviving nature's fury.—Wade Lee-Smith, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

Library Journal

★ 2020-03-15
How hurricanes have indelibly shaped America's land and society.

Drawing on abundant sources, including material from the National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, and Hurricane Research Division, and with an academic background in environmental policy, Dolin, who has a doctorate in environmental policy, offers an authoritative and lively history of hurricanes, beginning with 15th-century storms and ending with major hurricanes of 2017 and a brief account of Hurricane Dorian of last year. Besides chronicling the tense period leading up to landfall, the violent impact, the immediate responses, and the long-term recoveries, the author offers a fascinating history of weather forecasting, which was revolutionized by the telegraph in the mid-19th century. The Smithsonian Institution became the first repository of meteorological information when telegraph operators were instructed to send a message each morning describing the weather: cloudy, fair, or rainy. Soon, they added readings from meteorological instruments, making their forecasts more useful. In 1870, the U.S. Army Signal Corps took over weather forecasting, creating maps that could “predict the progression of weather over time.” But accuracy eluded forecasters until airplanes, satellites, radar, and computers came into play—and even then, controversy sometimes erupted about the intensity and course of a storm. Dolin traces many major events: “a storm surge of biblical proportions” in Galveston, Texas, in 1900; the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926; the Labor Day Hurricane that swept through the Florida Keys in 1935; the “sudden, jarring, widespread, and devastating” Great Hurricane of 1938; Hurricane Andrew in 1992, Katrina in 2005, and Sandy, which besieged New York City in 2012. Efforts to control hurricanes, such as seeding clouds with dry ice or silver iodide, failed. Other proposals, such as towing icebergs from the Arctic to cool the ocean and diminish a storm’s energy, were “outlandish and totally impractical.” Dolin underscores the threat of global warming to worsen hurricanes and urges society to act quickly and boldly “to counter this threat in any way we can.”

A sweeping, absorbing history of nature's power. (118 illustrations)

Kirkus Reviews

"[Dolin] blends lovely writing with clear explanations of technical concepts . . . With active language and sharp characters, he puts us in scene . . . Thanks to Dolin’s reporting and framing, each hurricane is a different story that delivers its own lesson about human nature."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Lyn Millner

"[A] thoroughly engrossing book."

Christian Science Monitor - Steve Donoghue