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AJ, as Catherine notes, does a good job at placing the Galveston Hurricane in a larger historical context and understanding its larger significance by arguing, “The era that this event occurred in, the way people went about handling the situation and the eventual misjudged outcome, I believe explains a lot about where disaster preparedness was at the time and showed Americans what desperately needed to change.” In doing so he defends, Isaac, who Catherine once again rightly paints as the books antagonist, by understanding the Hurricane’s human toll as largely resultant of the age rather than the actions of a few individuals. It is also a departure from what I understood to be an argument of Larson’s book; that the extent of the destruction can largely be attributable to issues born from individual decisions, namely those of Isaac Cline, William Stockman, H.C.C. Dunwoody, and Willis Moore. This is well evidenced in Larson’s desire to draw attention to the truthfulness of Isaac’s story concerning the his role in the warning of the hurricane; on page 168 and 169 he discusses how the inconsistencies between Isaac’s claim that his warnings saved the lives of over 6000 people and the possibility that he didn’t actually warn anyone (and even if he had it wouldn’t have saved 6000 lives). In drawing attention to these inconsistencies, he seems to be using the book as a platform to attack the common historical narrative, a narrative that the weather bureau, as the authority on storms, no doubt played a large role in shaping after the hurricane, and to furthermore place some of the blame onto the individuals who he believed to be disproportionately culpable for the massive losses of human life and destruction. This is also evidenced in the way that he constantly discusses the ways in which Morris’ desire for control, Dunwoody’s careerism, and Stockman’s hubris played in creating a society so vulnerable to disaster. While this desire to attribute personal guilt can be seen as a push back against a narrative that largely painted the disaster as a largely unavoidable societal failing and a call for reform, I believe we must additionally understand it as a product of Larson’s writing style. As was discussed in class and as I discussed in my blog post last week, McCullough’s ability to discuss characters without a disproportionate amount of attention paid to each one helped us, or at least me, to understand the Johnstown flood as a product of societal shortcomings. Conversely, Larson constructs his narrative around the thread of Isaac Cline’s life (going so far as to title his book Isaac’s storm, which in itself implies guilt). This narrative style, which puts such a large focus on one character as a sort of case study, seems to be predisposed by framing more individual guilt than a style, such as McCullough’s, which pays such even attention to such a multitude of characters.