Rating: 
Summary: An exciting read with well-researched detail
Review: This is a fast paced, well written, well researched book. It covers the science of hurricanes, some of the history of the U.S. weather service, and the life of a hard working weather observer named Isaac Cline.
The book does a great job describing the over-confidence of the American weather service. They were fantastically wrong about the storm. Before you can say, "Well, who knew anything about the weather in those days?" it explains that the Cuban weather service was trying to warn us about the storm, but were silenced by the American station in Cuba.
The best thing about the book is an almost steampunk feel that it gives with everyone geeking out over the telegraph, steel steamships, weather maps and man made harbors. The characters are up against a hurricane of fantastic proportions and they trust their modern technology to predict and subdue nature.
The only downside is that much of the book repeatedly sounds one note: These people have no idea what is coming. I never lost the lurid fascination of watching people who have no idea about the juggernaut bearing down upon them, but some of that space could have been devoted to exploring other details. In case you didn't get it, these people have no idea what force of nature is about to wipe out everything they know.
Larson gives great visual descriptions. I could literally see the roofs suddenly being removed from houses, people clinging to doors and trees, corpses floating past.
Another strength of the book is Larson's extensive research into first hand accounts of the storm and facts about other storms.
The book did not cast Cline as a hero, but instead portrayed him as a complex character who perhaps inflated his own role in protecting people from the storm. Did he bend the truth and ignore his instincts because of the oppressive bureaucracy he was in? It is still up in the air for me after reading the book. Perhaps that was the intent. The book contained some great villains of bureaucracy that were not so much evil as relentlessly pig-headed.
There is a lot here for weather geeks:
"The storm had undergone an intensification known to late-twentieth-century hurricanologists as explosive deepening, but the Weather Bureau of Isaac's time had no idea such a dramatic change could occur."
The book is a quick read. I would recommend it to anyone with a general interest in history or the weather.
Rating: 
Summary: Good reading for those fascinated by storms!
Review: This story is a painstakingly-researched chronicle of the hurricane which devastated the up-and-coming glorious city Galveston, Texas, in 1900. It is presented as the story of Isaac Cline, a meterologist who underestimates the power of one particular storm with tragic results. Beginning somewhat drily with the history of meteorology in the United States, the narrative proceeds to tell the stories of individual families and how they are affected as the storm unexpectedly arrives at their beach and ocean waters begin to swallow their beloved city. The pace of the account then picks up momentum and it's a race to see who will survive the momentous onslought of wind, rain, and sea water. Although the story of Isaac Cline evokes sympathy, as an individual he does not come across as a particularly appealing person. He works more or less as an adversary to his brother Joseph, also a meteorologist, both vying for top positions. The Weather Bureau of that time also seems less then helpful. Those in charge try to outmaneuver fellow meterologists in order for each man to claim his own fame. As the author indicates from his story, many forces were at work preventing the population of Galveston from knowing the true extent of the danger that was soon to engulf them. It reminds us that, in our own time, we are fortunate to be able to understand more about the forces of weather and sometimes have a better chance to avoid a tragic outcome of a huricane.
Rating: 
Summary: Titantic 2
Review: To this day I get angry when I think of what this writer did with a tragedy that needed no bluff and puff. Maybe his editors urged him to "take a point of view." Maybe not. The point is, Erik Larson is like a parasite that attaches itself to something bigger and feeds off it for as long as it can.
All Larson did was take Moby Dick and the Titanic, mix it up a bit with "The Perfect Storm" and he cooked up this putrid excuse for a book just in time for its 100th anniversary. Oh wow.
Larson pitted poor Isaac against a storm he had no way in hell of knowing was coming. In doing so, he attempted to make Isaac "the silly mortal" and the storm "the will of God or nature" or whatever it is man has no control over. Larson attempted to write an epic at the expence of Isaac. He tried to turn it into the "Titanic".... The Industrial era against nature....And it makes me want to vomit that he managed to sell the idea and the book to so many people.
I hate this book because the writer wrote it just to make some money or to make his name anyway he could. He was not true to the history and he hurt himself by being too eager to fall into the slime.
This book is nothing but a titanic want-a-be in the midst of an imperfect storm.
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