Isaac’s Storm:  A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
by Erik Larson
1999 / 323 pages
read by Richard Davidson 9h 38m
rating:  8.5 / non-fiction – history

Although Hurricane Katrina which hit the Gulf Coast in 2005 was larger and more costly, the hurricane which hit Galveston, Texas in September of 1900 is the deadliest the US has ever seen.

I’ve read three of Larson’s books,  The Devil in the White City (2003),   In the Garden of the Beasts (2011) and the brand new Dead Wake.  This earlier book concerns Isaac Cline, the chief meteorologist in Galveston at the time,  his background, his experience, the experiences of various other Galveston residents,  a lot of information about weather forecasting and the nature of hurricanes as understood today.  Many of the phenomenon which they saw and were able to measure then had not been seen in the lifetime of anyone alive so there was a lot of pooh-pooh’ing – barometric pressure was one of these.  >>>>MORE>>>>