Recounts a hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas in 1900. Story primarily built around the character of Isaac Cline, lead representative in Galveston of the federal government's still-young weather bureau.
A few thoughts:1. First part of the book did an interesting job of putting the storm in context. Gave some basics on hurricane formation plus some history of the manner in which scientific understanding had advanced as to these matters. I liked this.
2. Author emphasized the limits of human knowledge of complex weather systems in 1900, and that much uncertainty remains to this day. Seems relevant to everyone's favorite cause du jour (climate change, formerly known as global warming).
3. Galveston as an up-and-coming city; economy based on port activities. Topography seemed risky for flooding, but boosters and others convinced themselves otherwise. Sounded a bit like the "rain follows the plow" rhetoric employed by Plains States boosters back in the day.
4. Isaac not a terribly sympathetic character; some conflicts with his weatherman-brother (Joseph), etc.
5. Author did a good job taking the reader to the scene of the hurricane and letting us imagine how that might have felt. And the difficult scenes in the storm's aftermath.
6. Still - as the author points out, source material was very scarce. So there's an element of "winging it" here.
7. Galveston didn't recover. Houston bloomed with the oil industry.
8. Weather forecasting bureaucracy was a mess - shockingly, key government workers seemed primarily interested in keeping their jobs and enlarging their personal prestige. For example: adamantly ignoring folks in Cuba who were pretty experienced in observing these kinds of stories.
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