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Snow: A History of the World’s Most Fascinating Flake
The complete story of snow, this is the first book to fully examine snow as a historical, cultural, and scientific phenomenon.
From "Winter Wonderland" to "Snowmageddon," we've had a long, love-hate relationship with snow. This entertaining look at snow in all its delightful and fearsome manifestations delves into science, history, economics, and popular culture to examine snow's enduring hold on the imagination.
Through profiles and anecdotes, the author discusses the reactions throughout history to snowfall. Snow, beautiful and magical, was sometimes considered one of nature's blessings. But then it was also a nuisance needing to be managed and moved, and worse, a terrifying, sometimes-crippling catastrophe to be battled. Blizzards and high-volume snowfall presented a serious obstacle to progress, travel, growth, and industry.
Readers will learn about the making and removing of snow, the psychology of winter, and the history of snow in literature, art, and popular culture. The author also summarizes the current scientific understanding of major winter weather events and what is known about the complex interplay between the jet stream and the Gulf Stream. Despite sophisticated computer modeling, accurate forecasting is still a challenge.
Finally, the book considers the impact of global warming on snowfall and the potential for causing a water crisis in the West and major losses in the winter recreation industry.
Whether you look forward to months on the ski slopes or loathe the effects of winter on your daily commute, you'll come away from this book with a new appreciation for this amazing and important natural phenomenon.
From "Winter Wonderland" to "Snowmageddon," we've had a long, love-hate relationship with snow. This entertaining look at snow in all its delightful and fearsome manifestations delves into science, history, economics, and popular culture to examine snow's enduring hold on the imagination.
Through profiles and anecdotes, the author discusses the reactions throughout history to snowfall. Snow, beautiful and magical, was sometimes considered one of nature's blessings. But then it was also a nuisance needing to be managed and moved, and worse, a terrifying, sometimes-crippling catastrophe to be battled. Blizzards and high-volume snowfall presented a serious obstacle to progress, travel, growth, and industry.
Readers will learn about the making and removing of snow, the psychology of winter, and the history of snow in literature, art, and popular culture. The author also summarizes the current scientific understanding of major winter weather events and what is known about the complex interplay between the jet stream and the Gulf Stream. Despite sophisticated computer modeling, accurate forecasting is still a challenge.
Finally, the book considers the impact of global warming on snowfall and the potential for causing a water crisis in the West and major losses in the winter recreation industry.
Whether you look forward to months on the ski slopes or loathe the effects of winter on your daily commute, you'll come away from this book with a new appreciation for this amazing and important natural phenomenon.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published November 9, 2020
14 people are currently reading
117 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 10, 2021
Disappointing. Really limited geographical scope (Provided you're not from Pennsylvania. OK, US). Snow as a natural and a cultural phenomenon is far broader than how it was dealt with in this book. I had big expectations that it will outperform the Snow: A Scientific and Cultural Exploration, but no. What a pity. These my misadventures with the recent snow books only hardened me in the opinion. that any one wishing to learn something essential about the matter, should start at the fountainhead: The Snowflake: Winter's Frozen Artistry by Ken Libbrecht. Both authors relied on it (and the author of the present book even visited him at the lab and interviewed extensively). No wonder - although lacking broader cultural interpretation, it still appears more informative and, if I may, more pleasant to read.
January 29, 2022
Afraid to say this was, personally, a disappointing read. The book vastly oversells itself, being less a "history of the world's most fascinating flake" and more a "collection of a few stories the author heard plus a whole lot of facts about snow-related things (but often less about snow and more about American society)". I can understand why they didn't want to go with the second title though. Each chapter in this book is truly just a fact-dump, with chapters being split into uninformatively-subtitled sections, and anecdotes scattered across the pages which are meant to say something about our human relationship with snow but says more about what a primary-school teacher did in the 19th century when a blizzard hit a rural American town. If, like me, you have culturally next to nothing in common with the author I don't see how you'll enjoy reading this. If, on the other hand, you're a Philadelphian boomer who loves to reminisce about the good ol' days when winters were white then I'm sure this will be a gripping read.
I mean no offense to the author or the people he interviewed. It's clear that he is passionate about the subject himself. But this wasn't for me.
I mean no offense to the author or the people he interviewed. It's clear that he is passionate about the subject himself. But this wasn't for me.
July 3, 2021
SNOW: A History of the World’s Most Fascinating Flake by Anthony R. Wood. Prometheus Books, Guilford, CT. $24.95
Anthony R. Wood’s Snow is as much a philosophy of weather as a book about frozen precipitation that falls as hexagonal crystals, to paraphrase his description. But that part of Snow emerges as pleasantly as spring after a rough winter. His first concern is to give us a practical history of the loveliest kind of weather that so consistently presents us with a crisis; for instance, as soon we try to open the front door on a snowy winter morning, if we can even get it open.
Most snow-storms are not as threatening as hurricanes, or tornadoes; rather they are a constant beautiful menace, and millions of people would resent my use of “beautiful.” Nevertheless, Wood, who is a science writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, is in no doubt that is the appropriate word. Marianne Moore might have admired this passage. "As Bentley verified, under a microscope a snowflake bares the evidence of what it has been through on its raucous trip through the atmosphere. The seed crystal began as a simple six-sided plate. The arms grew as the crystal migrated through the clouds, responding to changes in temperatures and dew points. The arms maintained symmetry because even though they grew independently, they all experienced those same changing conditions."
Wood begins with an account of some of the greatest storms that have fallen on the east coast of the United States, and the lake cities of upstate New York, the areas with the heaviest concentration of people in the western world who are buried on occasion under large snow falls.
The I-95 corridor is the part of the country where Wood has spent most of his life, and one of his opening chapters gives us a frigid account of life in colonial America, long before superhighways, during the mini-ice-age of 1400-1800, when there were a few thousand, and then a few million, settlers clinging to the eastern seaboard who experienced snow storms of depth and ferocity that were unknown in Northwestern Europe, which is warmed by the Gulf Stream. Many of the settlers had come to America expecting it to be much warmer than it is. Cotton Mather, and other 17th and 18th century writers, assured European correspondents that Europe had never seen terrifying snows like those that fell on the American settlements.
After this vivid account of colonial storms, mostly recollected in diaries and letters, Wood describes a surprising shift in public attitudes toward snow, a “pax nivalis” as he calls it, a snowy peace that descended on public opinion as isolated settlements turned into towns, and early lumbering and shipping businesses found that the frozen roads of New York and New England made it possible to drag logs quickly. This lasted for about thirty years after 1800, as the mini-ice-age warmed, and sleighs made for rapid, pleasant movement over snow packed roads.
But the big cities and ports were having none of that, and as they grew in population, the shoveling and salting of thousands of streets became the political and practical topic it remains to this day, although with shifts in controversy. Salting of streets was extremely unpopular in the 19th century because it is harmful to horses, and was outlawed in some places. Railroads and snow plows were invented.
Wood’s most unexpected focus is on the great “snowmen” who have investigated snow, its design, its causes, and how to predict it. His descriptions of Wilson Bentley, Francis Davis, Joel Myers, and Kenneth G. Libbrecht, to name a few of them, are as lively as they are at times comic. They are people with a different view of life and the world than millions of post-modernists, but who nevertheless knew what they wanted—to study snow. The secret agenda of this mission is the more snow, the easier to study it, although this is kept from television viewers watching the news at 11:20 on a winter night. Wood is very discreet in revealing his own deep affection for it, the deeper the better.
The National Weather Service is the great provider of storm information, and he explains how this has enabled AccuWeather and The Weather Channel to exist and to compete with each other, although at enormous government expense, as the data they crunch is provided to them free by the NWS. The two weather giants have enormous meteorological and legal disagreements, and in about the same measure, which makes sense when you read Wood’s description of their battles. Those involved have advanced degrees, great technical expertise, are providing an essential service; and doing something they love to do, all of which buffers or conceals the stormy egos at work in weather prediction. And the taxpayer funds much of it.
I once watched a television weather report of a blizzard in Chicago that showed a woman go sliding down a pavement on an icy, windy street at about twenty miles an hour, only to be stopped by a man, himself clutching a street-pole, who reached out and grabbed her by the coat; she was still standing when she reached him. There are empty landscapes, and then there are landscapes with people in them. In bad weather there are never too many people, whatever the population experts say.
#
Lawrence Dugan’s poem “Hurricane Gloria” was published in a recent issue of ARION: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. He is a retired librarian living in Philadelphia with many relatives in Montana.
Anthony R. Wood’s Snow is as much a philosophy of weather as a book about frozen precipitation that falls as hexagonal crystals, to paraphrase his description. But that part of Snow emerges as pleasantly as spring after a rough winter. His first concern is to give us a practical history of the loveliest kind of weather that so consistently presents us with a crisis; for instance, as soon we try to open the front door on a snowy winter morning, if we can even get it open.
Most snow-storms are not as threatening as hurricanes, or tornadoes; rather they are a constant beautiful menace, and millions of people would resent my use of “beautiful.” Nevertheless, Wood, who is a science writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, is in no doubt that is the appropriate word. Marianne Moore might have admired this passage. "As Bentley verified, under a microscope a snowflake bares the evidence of what it has been through on its raucous trip through the atmosphere. The seed crystal began as a simple six-sided plate. The arms grew as the crystal migrated through the clouds, responding to changes in temperatures and dew points. The arms maintained symmetry because even though they grew independently, they all experienced those same changing conditions."
Wood begins with an account of some of the greatest storms that have fallen on the east coast of the United States, and the lake cities of upstate New York, the areas with the heaviest concentration of people in the western world who are buried on occasion under large snow falls.
The I-95 corridor is the part of the country where Wood has spent most of his life, and one of his opening chapters gives us a frigid account of life in colonial America, long before superhighways, during the mini-ice-age of 1400-1800, when there were a few thousand, and then a few million, settlers clinging to the eastern seaboard who experienced snow storms of depth and ferocity that were unknown in Northwestern Europe, which is warmed by the Gulf Stream. Many of the settlers had come to America expecting it to be much warmer than it is. Cotton Mather, and other 17th and 18th century writers, assured European correspondents that Europe had never seen terrifying snows like those that fell on the American settlements.
After this vivid account of colonial storms, mostly recollected in diaries and letters, Wood describes a surprising shift in public attitudes toward snow, a “pax nivalis” as he calls it, a snowy peace that descended on public opinion as isolated settlements turned into towns, and early lumbering and shipping businesses found that the frozen roads of New York and New England made it possible to drag logs quickly. This lasted for about thirty years after 1800, as the mini-ice-age warmed, and sleighs made for rapid, pleasant movement over snow packed roads.
But the big cities and ports were having none of that, and as they grew in population, the shoveling and salting of thousands of streets became the political and practical topic it remains to this day, although with shifts in controversy. Salting of streets was extremely unpopular in the 19th century because it is harmful to horses, and was outlawed in some places. Railroads and snow plows were invented.
Wood’s most unexpected focus is on the great “snowmen” who have investigated snow, its design, its causes, and how to predict it. His descriptions of Wilson Bentley, Francis Davis, Joel Myers, and Kenneth G. Libbrecht, to name a few of them, are as lively as they are at times comic. They are people with a different view of life and the world than millions of post-modernists, but who nevertheless knew what they wanted—to study snow. The secret agenda of this mission is the more snow, the easier to study it, although this is kept from television viewers watching the news at 11:20 on a winter night. Wood is very discreet in revealing his own deep affection for it, the deeper the better.
The National Weather Service is the great provider of storm information, and he explains how this has enabled AccuWeather and The Weather Channel to exist and to compete with each other, although at enormous government expense, as the data they crunch is provided to them free by the NWS. The two weather giants have enormous meteorological and legal disagreements, and in about the same measure, which makes sense when you read Wood’s description of their battles. Those involved have advanced degrees, great technical expertise, are providing an essential service; and doing something they love to do, all of which buffers or conceals the stormy egos at work in weather prediction. And the taxpayer funds much of it.
I once watched a television weather report of a blizzard in Chicago that showed a woman go sliding down a pavement on an icy, windy street at about twenty miles an hour, only to be stopped by a man, himself clutching a street-pole, who reached out and grabbed her by the coat; she was still standing when she reached him. There are empty landscapes, and then there are landscapes with people in them. In bad weather there are never too many people, whatever the population experts say.
#
Lawrence Dugan’s poem “Hurricane Gloria” was published in a recent issue of ARION: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. He is a retired librarian living in Philadelphia with many relatives in Montana.
December 21, 2021
Reading with great Interest. Keep recalling the task of an elderly neighbor and me who shared a 450 ft acess drive to houses doing the snow blowing to remove the snow. We had a 3" rule -start the snow blowing; we tried to not do it between 10pm and 6 am so not to wake the neighbors. A couple of the storms exceeded 3" during evening respet making morning snow-blow challenging. Good to see that the "precautionary Principle" is applied when discussing "climate change", " global warming" and hardly any reference to the phrase " the science is settled"!! Another detail; the difference between shipboard measurement and sattelite values for oceanic-coastal water surface temperarures in the Gulf stream. It indicates a band of uncertainty it would be good to wrap around Manns hockey stick. The book identifies in a few places the importance of dew point temperature as both a ground feature and knowing its value as a vertical profile through the atmosphere. More can be learned about the history of the earths weather from dewpoint temperarure data and air tempersture comparisons rather than air temperature alone. The description of determining the size and shapes of snow flakes, accompanied by a picture is elegant, more so a discussion about what lands on the ground depends on the height of the snow storm. The chapter sub-titles give a great summary of what follows allowing one to focus on the many topics related to snow storms, what produces them, and the difficulty of predicting location and intensity.
July 12, 2023
In the East, snow can be disruption, enchantment, beauty. In the arid West, snow is white gold. The essence of snow is part of the essence of life in the West. Snow is water in magnificent disguise.
Much like other readers have expressed, this one was disappointing. The title is a definitely a misnomer, with Snow being more of a meandering tour of various snow-adjacent facts/topics in American history. The East Coast-centric narrative was tiresome by about the third chapter (the author seems to be unaware that other parts of the country have significance?) and the inordinate number of pages dedicated to weather forecasting was monotonous. I did enjoy the discussion of the shifting cultural relationship with snow (particularly the shift from a phenomenon of wonder, to refuse, to an economic obstacle/threat), the brief history of snow-making in the ski industry, and various other intriguing tidbits, but by the end, Snow had mostly become a chore. Still rating relatively high simply because I went into this read hoping to learn a lot and that was still the case (despite doldrums).
Much like other readers have expressed, this one was disappointing. The title is a definitely a misnomer, with Snow being more of a meandering tour of various snow-adjacent facts/topics in American history. The East Coast-centric narrative was tiresome by about the third chapter (the author seems to be unaware that other parts of the country have significance?) and the inordinate number of pages dedicated to weather forecasting was monotonous. I did enjoy the discussion of the shifting cultural relationship with snow (particularly the shift from a phenomenon of wonder, to refuse, to an economic obstacle/threat), the brief history of snow-making in the ski industry, and various other intriguing tidbits, but by the end, Snow had mostly become a chore. Still rating relatively high simply because I went into this read hoping to learn a lot and that was still the case (despite doldrums).
September 4, 2021
Mr. Wood's book makes me aware of the interesting lives of scientists, academics, and professionals who devote themselves to the study of snow. As a veteran reporter on weather at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr. Wood knows just about everyone in the weather forecasting business. Reading this book a few pages or a chapter at a time has offered me rare enjoyment in different ways. Above all, what impresses me the most is the author's childhood fascination with snow and of weather in general; and how snow and weather play a central role in global and American history, science and psyche. There is also a lot of interesting gossip in Mr. Wood's delightful, witty and pithy writing when it comes to snow. I can't help but admire Mr. Wood for his single-minded devotion to exploring snow as a general science subject. I read this book at the height of a very hot summer and the book made me wish to have winter soon so that I could see snow again. It is a blessing to have a subject that engages one's soul. Tony Wood is not just an excellent reporter on snow. He is Snow's spokesman.
October 31, 2021
As it started to get chilly and I can feel that winter is approaching, this book caught my eye in the library and without hesitation I picked this up and sit in the corner and read. At first it is very interesting to know history of snow and the spirit of winter especially living in a cold state but then it just didn’t give details that would’ve make me more interested. But if you are looking for history of snowstorms and the locations, this is a good book to read.
February 1, 2021
Anthony Wood has written a magical book. It is chock full of facts, and humor. And as an amateur snowy, I couldn't find a more delightful way to read about that fascinating flake.
May 27, 2021
A mostly anecdotal history of snow in a Pennsylvanian town.
Doesn't live up to the hype.
Doesn't live up to the hype.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews