Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History » (First Vintage Books Edition)

Erik Larson has an uncanny ability to find riveting stories lurking in rarely-explored corners of American history. From the devastating hurricane he recounted in Isaac s Storm to the exploits of a monstrous serial killer in Devil in the White City, Erik Larson is proving that a book doesn t have to be fictional to be wildly entertaining.

September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged in a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over six thousand people in what remains the greatest natural disaster in American history--and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devestating personal tragedy.

Using Cline's own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man's heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. Riveting, powerful, and unbearably suspenseful, Isaac's Storm is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets the great uncontrollable force of...

The Christian Science Monitor - John Christian Hoyle

Larson based the book on Cline's well-documented and sometimes personal reports of the storm as well as testimony from people who survived the hurricane....[A] classic tale of mankind versus nature — which once again describes the capricious and sometimes deadly nature of weather.