Silver Lining in a Funnel Cloud - Preview: How Greed and Corruption Destroyed the Joplin Tornado Recovery

by Randy Turner

In the days and months after the May 22, 2011 Joplin Tornado destroyed one-third of the Missouri city, people around the world applauded the courage and resilience of a community that was not going to let an EF-5 tornado put them down. The faces of City Manager Mark Rohr, School Superintendent C. J. Huff and Mayor Mike Woolston became staples on television news. Silver Lining in a Funnel Cloud: How Greed and Corruption tells the story of these leaders during the tornado and the days after and how each of them contributed to the destruction of what had been a feel-good story for the ages. Turner, the author or co-author of three previous books on the Joplin Tornado- 5:41: Stories from the Joplin Tornado, Spirit of Hope: The Year After the Joplin Tornado, and Scars from the Tornado: One Year at Joplin East Middle School, offers a detailed narrative of the tornado, the days afterward, and how the city and school district's leaders went astray with their determination to not only rebuild Joplin, but to rebuild it bigger and better. This is the preview edition, the first approximately 100 pages of the book, which has a tentative publishing date in May 2015. The preview, which is already drawing positive feedback, tells the stories of how one of the Joplin leaders capitalized on another person's work to build a reputation as the hero of the Joplin Tornado, how another leader used the tornado in an effort to accomplish projects that had nothing whatsoever to do with the recovery, and how a slick talking former politician from Texas took the city for a ride to the tune of millions of dollars. The preview offers a solid, highly readable sample of a book that should serve as a warning to public officials involved in disaster recovery. Turner is uniquely qualified to tell the story, having served as a teacher at Joplin East Middle School during the time of the tornado, and having a previous career as an investigative reporter at various Missouri newspapers. He is also the author of three other non-fiction books, Let Teachers Teach, Newspaper Days, and The Turner Report, as well as three novels, No Child Left Alive, Small Town News, and Devil's Messenger.

72 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 27, 2015

About the author

Randy Turner is a retired middle school English teacher and spent more than two decades as a journalist, earning more than 100 awards, including 30 for investigative reporting. He has written 16 books, including three novels and 13 non-fiction books,