Monster Tornado: The Incredible True Story of America's Most Devastating Twister

by Mark Levine

It was April 3, 1974 and the United States was in turmoil. Crime was soaring, unemployment and inflation were out of control, the Vietnam War had just come to a demoralising end and the soon-to-be-disgraced President Nixon was on his way out of office. Then, over a sixteen-hour period, nature stepped forward with its own display of mayhem, as an unprecedented outbreak of 148 tornadoes descended on the country. The destruction wrought was horrifying - hundreds killed, thousands of homes demolished, a billion dollars in losses sustained.

Amidst this chaos, acclaimed journalist Mark Levine follows the devastating path of a twin set of F5s - the rarest, and most deadly, category of tornado, and their impact on a rich cast of intertwined characters. Ordinary lives are transformed in one bewildering, terrifying instant: a pair of teenage lovers caught while driving on a dark country road; a Vietnam veteran trapped at home with a newborn baby; a sheriff caught in the line of fire twice in rapid succession; a black preacher with a past of dire hardship struggling to protect his family. Other figures enter the story from the broader cultural scene: Hank Aaron, on his way to challenging baseball's home run record amid racist death threats; Patty Hearst, whose image as kidnapping victim is undergoing a radical shift; Richard Nixon, intent on using the storms for his political advantage; and a memorably eccentric scientist, known as Mr Tornado, who regards the 'Superoutbreak' as the apotheosis of his scholarly life.

Monster Tornado provides a vivid and remarkable portrait of a unique point in American history - a time of incredible and unsettling convergence, where weather and people collided, and the fortunes of a series of characters, obscure and famous, would change forever.

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 2008

About the author

Mark Levine is the author of four books of poetry: Debt (1993), Enola Gay (2000), The Wilds (2006), and Travels of Marco (2016). His poetry has appeared in a number of anthologies, including American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics (2007) and American Hybrid (2009), among others. His work of nonfiction, F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the 20th Century (2007), is a history of the outbreak of 148 tornadoes across the United States in early April 1973. He has written for magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, Outside, the New Yorker, and Bicycling magazine.

Levine is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. An associate professor of poetry at the University of Iowa, Levine has taught in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop since 1999.

~www.poetryfoundation.org

Reviews

[Kelly Kazek · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wonderful book tells a story I am familiar with: The devastation of the tornadoes that struck Limestone County, AL, on April 3, 1974. I knew many people featured in this book. Levine does an incredible job of weaving the tales of various people caught in the storm with the effects of the twisters as they struck. Powerful.

[pianogal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite kind of tornado book. This was equal parts about the meteorology of the storm combined with the story of people's lives. I knew about the 1974 Super Outbreak, but I had no idea that two monster storms hit the same area in the same hour. Just think about how much energy that took in the atmosphere.

Good read.