Book Review: Isaac's Storm

"This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself."
-Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm

I have to start by saying that I absolutely adore Erik Larson. He writes non-fiction that is gripping, page-turning delight. His book The Devil in the White City is one of my all-time favorites, and it is he (along with Jon Krakauer) who taught me to love non-fiction.

Larson's books tend to follow a pattern; he chooses an interesting, but forgotten event/era and brings it to life. He does so by focusing on the intimate details of a few lives (who become the main characters) and weaving those details in and among "big picture" descriptions of the event/era.

In Isaac's Storm the event is a devastating hurricane which nearly wiped the city of Galveston, TX off the map in 1900. Even now, 117 years later, it remains the deadliest natural disaster to have occurred on American soil.

Larson's sweeping descriptions of the storm and its aftermath are haunting. But it is in the details that Isaac's Storm doesn't quite land. Larson chooses to focus on meteorologist Isaac Cline, his brother Jacob, and a few fatuous men from the fledgling U.S. National Weather Service. He makes their stories as interesting as he possibly can, constructing the drama from old letters and telegraphs, but the story just didn't catch me. 

I think part of the problem is that Isaac Cline, as a person, seems kind of cold and reserved, and so as the sympathetic center of the book, he just didn't quite work. 

Still, the magical way that Erik Larson makes history come alive is always such a treat, and I fully enjoyed looking for further information and old pictures of the Galveston Hurricane. Any book that fires up my imagination in that way deserves at least 4 stars.