The Children's Blizzard

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Book
Review: Mr. Laskin did an excellent job of presenting not only the life and death struggles faced by the children, teachers, and families, on January 12, 1888, but he also explains in detail the weather events leading up to the blizzard. I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in the pioneers and settlers of the Great Plains.


Rating:
Summary: Was Wovoka right?
Review: David Laskin sets up the story of the January 12, 1888, blizzard well. He provides the back story of the Mennonite and Norwegian immigrants, the valiant teachers and students, and the Civil War veteran, whose daughter took refuge in a haystack during the storm. The reader learns to care about the participants before the blizzard starts and there is gut-wrenching suspense as the victims head out into the storm. Which of them will survive? Will any of them survive?

The main characters are the Schweizers, Swiss-German Mennonites who had emigrated to America from the Ukraine, the Rollags from Norway, and Walter Allen, a mischievous little boy who adds comic relief to an otherwise tragic story.

The day of the blizzard starts off unusually warm and the kids on their way to school and the farmers working in the fields aren't dressed properly. The temperature drops precipitously and the snow isn't ordinary slow; it's more like blinding sleet.

Laskin is also a weather geek; he provides more than we want to know about the cause of this "Storm of the Century." He provides info about lows and highs, jet streams and jet streaks (this little bugger is a main culprit), fronts, and St. Elmo's Fire. He also shows how the Signal Corps weathermen bungled the forecast. It's all very informative but we want to know what happened to the Schweizer children and Will Allen. An especially riveting scene is when Laskin explains hypothermia, using the Schweizer boys as an example.

In an epilogue, Laskin tells us what happened to the survivors and he makes a rather specious statement, suggesting that this storm put an end to the land boom on the Great Plains and that eventually immigrants learned that, although the soil was some of the best in the world, because of droughts and blizzards this land was uninhabitable. Apparently white people are leaving in droves and the land is returning to the buffalo and the Indians. When Wovoka told his people to dance and the buffalo would return, he wasn't too far wrong.

Rating:
Summary: A Few Lines About a Great Book
Review: I rarely write reviews on Amazon, but I felt compelled to write about this one, and I am e-mailing all my friends to tell them to pick it up immediately.

I spent the afternoon (by the fire--thank God) reading parts of the book aloud to my husband and son. They were memerized and it sparked all kinds of discussion--from weather patterns to the fortitude of the Homesteaders, to how lucky we are to have what we have.

The phrase "page-turner" is too cheap for this book, but it is that, and much, much more.
Kudos to David Laskin for writing such an important work.

Rating:
Summary: A must for history and weather fans
Review: Like Isaac's Storm (Erik Larson) before it, The Children's Blizzard takes us into a nearly forgotton place in American history and slaps us with the almost casual brutality of life before modern meteorology. David Laskin has researched the subject of the blizzard of 1888 in meticulous fashion and we can't help but be impressed with his scholarship. Laskin has previously written on meteorology and he has a way of making the capricious nature of the atmosphere highly accessible.

Readers should be warned that Laskin is unsparing in his depiction of the death by exposure of children trapped in the storm. If you've read "To Build a Fire" by Jack London (whom he credits) you'll have a small idea of what these children go through. Images will haunt you: Parents dragging their frozen children into the house to thaw by the fire so their contorted bodies will fit into tiny coffins. Even those who survive must endure gruesome injuries. This is history and it must be told. But one wonders what ever made these settlers think such a life was worth the hardships. It was a rare family that had not lost children, even before the great blizzard.

A minor criticism of The Children's Blizzard is its tendency, especially early, to focus on historical minutiae. Emphasis on the life of plains settlers before they left Europe drags down the early narrative.

Recommended, but not for the easily disturbed reader.

Rating:
Summary: Personal family history
Review: My grandparents immigrated from Norway to North Dakota, and I spent many summers with them. It's a strange state, weather-wise. I've lived in New England for 30 years and there's just no comparison.

I read this book in one day; it totally consumed me, thinking about my grandparents and how they managed to survive in such an in hospitable climate. It also makes me grateful of the sacrifices they made for their children.

Parts of this should be required reading in American history.

Rating:
Summary: The Perfect Storm Over the Plains
Review: The book describes "The School Children's Blizzard" of 1888 in remarkable detail. The meterological details are described nicely (although more maps might have been an aide to the description). The political feud and the emphasis on the "verification" of forecasts is also explored. It's very clear that the weather forecasters of the time failed to use the technology available (observations submitted via train and telegraph)to warn the public of the impending blizzard.

The decisions of the families, children, and school teachers are described for a small subset of people impacted by the storm. Their stories are truly heartbreaking. The suffering of the children is described in some cases through the recollections of their descendents. It is here that the book finds its most powerful voice. The deaths of five children from exposure is imagined by the author, and although there is no direct evidence of how the children died, his description of hypothermia and the mental and physical effects of exposure jive well with the medical literature and more main stream literature such as "Into Thin Air."

Having driven through this area of the US during the last year I found the description of homesteading and the hardships endured to be amazing. How the Dakota Territory was settled is nothing short of a miracle. Locusts, droughts, blizzards, and the lack of community brought on by settling land in 160 acre plots makes one wonder how 40% of all homesteaders managed to "prove up."

Very interesting read. Makes one feel blessed that we have the ability to predict the weather much more precisely than they did in the 1880's. Great gift for those interested in weather and US history.

Rating:
Summary: Too Padded to Be Great
Review: The Children's Blizzard is a harrowing tale, at least the sections that are directly about the terrible blizzard of 1888 that swept over the Dakota-Nebraska prairie. The author, David Laskin, picks some interesting tales of both survival and death and makes the entire terrifying night come alive. The full book, though, contains much more than these sequences and feels overly padded as the tales of immigrants arriving in America blend into discussions of how cold fronts move to the history of the weather service and further into quite gruesome accounts of what actually takes place as the body freezes (despite its graphic nature this particular section proves quite important to the story.) The book pales beside such classics as Isaac's Storm as the pieces do not always move towards creating a compelling narrative. Still when the blizzard finally hits the various tales of teachers, children, and farmers caught out in it are weaved together quite well.

Rating:
Summary: Read In Front of the Fire
Review: We forget sometimes just how vicious nature can be. In hurricanes this year, in 1991's Perfect Storm, the tri-State Tornado in 1925, and the Children's Blizzard of 1888 nature showed what it can do. Of these disasters, the Children's Blizzard is the least well known. Finally we have a book that chronicles this incident.

January 12, 1888 was a nice balmy day, the first after a fairly hard few weeks. Children went off to school without coats and gloves, farmers went out to work on projects they had been putting off.

Then the cold front came through. In three minutes the temperature dropped 18 degrees. A vicious wind blowing heavy snow caused a whiteout that dropped visibility to near zero. By midnight the windhill was down to 40 below zero. By morning (Friday the thirteenth) some 500 people were dead, many of them children trying to get home from school.

1888 was, by our standards, a primative time. There were certainly no satellite imagery put on television by the local weather forecaster. To be sure, there was some indication of a drop in temperature and snow at the weather forecasting office, but extremely limited communications prevented this warning from being widely circulated.

Well researched, well written, this is a book for reading in front of the fire in a strongly built house (the storm ripped the roof off of many schools, exposing the inside to the full fury of the storm) maybe with a hot buttered rum at hand.

Rating:
Summary: Read This Book
Review: What a mesmerizing tale woven of many threads. Stayed up way past my bedtime to devour the book. Even the scientific info (thanks for the chart) wasn't all that daunting. Having just ridden across the plains via train, during which trip several of us said we would commit suicide if we had to live in such a desolate wasteland, I felt the story in my bones. This Seattle reader urges you to read this Seattle-area author's wonderful book.