For several months now, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Eric Larson has been my traveling book—the one I read on airplanes and city buses. I recently finished it on the last leg of a trip. And I have thoughts.

Isaac’s Storm tells the story of the hurricane that flattened Galveston in 1900. Larson captures the epic scale of the storm while telling us a human story of tragedy and loss.

Larson uses more than half the book to build to what he terms the cataclysm, a combination of unstoppable natural power and bad decisions based on hubris. He opens the book on the night before the storm, introducing us to Galveston and to Isaac Cline, the U.S. Weather Bureau’s resident meteorologist in Galveston. In the second chapter, he introduces us to the other major character of the book, the storm itself, with a breathtakingly beautiful line: “It began, as all things must, with an awakening of molecules.” Moving forward he describes how the storm grew, making the science of hurricanes clear to this non-scientist.[1]—and how new the science of meteorology was at the time. He gives us the history of the Weather Bureau, and a vivid picture of how political infighting within the organization contributed to multiple miscalculations about the power of the storm and where it would hit land. He introduces us to individuals in Galveston. He builds the tension.

The pace picks up when the storm hits Galveston. Using telegrams, newspaper accounts, letters, and later memories of Cline and others, Larson takes his readers back and forth through the city, tracing the experiences of the people to whom he has previously introduced us. Each story is marked with uncertainty, as people make decisions that will determine whether they and those around them will live or die. Larson’s storytelling is masterful in this section, holding the reader is suspense as he moves from vignette to vignette

Isaac’s Storm came out in 1999—not Larson’s first book but his first work of the narrative non-fiction for which he is famous. When compared to his later books of his, it is clear that he is still learning his craft. If I felt any disappointment, it is because I have read later work: early Larson is still better than many books that I read.

*****

A small coda: As those of you who have been following me around for a while know, I adore footnotes.  For those of you who ignore the footnote section, Larson opens his notes in this book with a lovely brief essay on exploring “the lives of history’s little men.” I strongly recommend it to readers, and writers, of biography. I think I will return to it in the future.


[1] I will admit, several days after I closed the book, I would not be able to reproduce most of the science if you asked me to do so.