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Foreword: I have to say that I have honestly enjoyed the material read for Monday. An excellent piece of crafted historical narrative that I applaud Erik Larson for creating as a historian should always be enthusiastic in his writing and not dull to the point where you lose your audience, even if they are able to mentally consume the material posted. Such methods must be examined more in today’s world if the historians of today want to make an impact on the world.
As a a history major who takes more pleasure in learning about such details like the specifications of a Tiger I Heavy Tank of World War II, I mainly looked at Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson as another read I would not be able to connect with due to my tastes. Still, despite that feeling, I was pleasantly surprised and thus became immersed into this historical narrative of the devastation of Galveston an the author argument that man cannot ignore nor control nature (Larson 16). One such reason I was pulled into it was the setting of the scene by the author with constant mentions of important events of the time (like the Boxer Rebellion) and the background of Isaac Cline. Yet it was the background of the Weather Bureau that won me over with his mentioning of major problems with the bureau, such in the case where Willis Moore and his weather bureau’s dislike of Cuba’s bureau where, “It was an attitude, however, that seemed to mask a deeper fear that Cuba’s own meteorologists might in fact be better at predicting hurricanes” (Larson 102). Without this unnecessary beef between these organizations, more lives could of been saved in alerting Galveston of the hurricane. It is important to note, however, that the author’s main focus is on man being unable to enslave nature. This is seen with Captain Simmon’s faith in his experience and his steel ship, best referenced as, “the technological arrogance of the time” (Larson 128), in which he placed himself and his crew in danger of the storm that threatened to turnover his ship (Larson 129). In a post about the Chicago Fire, slee72897 brought up an idea that can be applied here, “of ‘natural vs. unnatural’, not about the environment and how humans impact nature, but the how humans respond to these natural or unnatural events.” This thought process best concludes this post as it works excellently with this argument by Larson man can create things, like a steam boat or train, that can somewhat ignore nature’s powers but in the end will always submit to it when the time comes.
Tiger I Heavy Tank in case anyone wanted to know what it looked like.