Description:
Journalist David Laskin writes, "The history of weather is both a history of nature and a history of human desire. A history that is made and erased every day." And the history of American weather is particularly problematic: "Our weather and climate have been strange since the beginning of our history. Our perceptions have always been skewed by expectation, our memories distorted by self-interest." From a European perspective, North American weather is never usual: it is too hot, too cold, too violent, and, for most of the continent, much too dry. But Americans' minds never quite catch up with the weather where they actually live: "When we move, weather is the last thing we leave behind and the first thing we find when we arrive. Weather, in a sense, is home." Laskin's great insight is that the weather is never what we expect, because we always misremember the past. And in America in particular, this unexpected weather is always a sign of something: God's vengeance, human tampering, the progress or the regress of civilization. Laskin covers American weather from the warm spell that lured the Norse to Greenland, through the little ice age and the dust bowl, up to the greenhouse anxieties of the turn of the millennium. "We are constantly making and revising the history of weather, but weather itself is ahistorical. Infinite, fathomless, incalculable, it just keeps happening, regardless, every day." --Mary Ellen Curtin
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