Hurricanes menace North America from June through 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 the 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 terribly 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 reimagine our relationship
with the planet.
