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If it were not for the descriptions of the historical backgrounds of weather tracking and hurricanes/tropical storms, I would have been inclined to believe that Isaac’s Storm is a historical fiction about a town’s experience with a terrible hurricane. The pacing, the “characters”, the level of depth that Erik Larson delves into the topic of weather and human interaction with weather/nature, certainly makes me want to finish this book tonight! (Obvious overstatement but it truly is a good read so far.) I share many of the same sentiments as rhuska, definitely “expecting the book to follow more traditional historical writing” but being pleasantly surprised that it is not at all traditional.
I certainly appreciate how Larson sets up the story to be friendly with people who have no knowledge of the meteorologist lingo that he throws around. It seems to be more for the audience that does understand such statistics but for those who are not so interested in meteorology, Larson makes it quite easy to understand from the get-go that there is a big storm coming and nobody is prepared for it.
The book is structured in a way that attempts to cover whatever necessary information is needed to understand the storm despite the fact that it is a narrative that describes the events chronologically. Larson does this by retelling of the experiences Columbus and his crew had with weather, offering explanations of meteorology, shifting from different perspectives of the event (although Isaac Cline is his main focus), and just simply offering more than just numbers about the event. There is a level of social engineering and human decisions that affected the outcomes of the storm and Larson does a really good job at narrating what happened that allowed the storm to be more disastrous than it had to be.
I am looking forward to finishing this book!