Hurricanes menace North America from June through to November every
year, each as powerful as 10,000 nuclear bombs. These megastorms
will likely become more intense as the planet continues to warm,
yet we too often treat them as local disasters and TV spectacles,
unaware of how far-ranging their impact can be. As best-selling
historian Eric Jay Dolin contends, we must look to our nation's
past if we hope to comprehend the consequences of the hurricanes of
the future. With A Furious Sky, Dolin has created a vivid,
sprawling account of our encounters with hurricanes, from the
nameless storms that threatened Columbus's New World voyages to the
destruction wrought in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria. Weaving a
story of shipwrecks and devastated cities, of heroism and folly,
Dolin introduces a rich cast of unlikely heroes, such as Benito
Vines, a nineteenth-century Jesuit priest whose innovative methods
for predicting hurricanes saved countless lives and puts us in the
middle of the most devastating storms of the past, none worse than
the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed at least 6,000
people, the highest toll of any natural disaster in American
history. Dolin draws on a vast array of sources as he melds
American history, as it is usually told, with the history of
hurricanes, showing how these tempests frequently helped determine
the nation's course. Hurricanes, it turns out, prevented Spain from
expanding its holdings in North America beyond Florida in the late
1500s and they also played a key role in shifting the tide of the
American Revolution against the British in the final stages of the
conflict. As he moves through the centuries, following the rise of
the United States despite the chaos caused by hurricanes, Dolin
traces the corresponding development of hurricane science, from
important discoveries made by Benjamin Franklin to the
breakthroughs spurred by the necessities of World War II and the
Cold War. Yet after centuries of study and despite remarkable leaps
in scientific knowledge and technological prowess, there are still
limits on our ability to predict exactly when and where hurricanes
will strike and we remain vulnerable to the greatest storms on
earth. A Furious Sky is, ultimately, a story of a changing climate
and it forces us to reckon with the reality that, as bad as the
past has been, the future will probably be worse unless we
drastically re-imagine our relationship with the planet.
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