Description: September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau, failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged by a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over 6,000 people in what remains the greatest natural disaster in American history -- and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devastating personal tragedy.

Using Cline's own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man's heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. Thrilling, powerful, and unrelentingly suspenseful, Isaac's Storm is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets the uncontrollable force of nature.

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Reviews: The immense hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900, has solid claim to be the most powerful storm in American history. With more than 6,000 persons dead across the nation, no one can doubt that it was the most destructive. Leaping into full roar in the Florida Strait, the cyclone ravaged the Texas coast and then arced into the Mississippi valley where it collided with a huge low-pressure system. Vastly renewed, it slashed across the upper Midwest and New England, bellowed into the North Atlantic where it sank numerous vessels, and finally died out unseen in Siberia. The book is also the story of a doughty meteorologist, Isaac Cline, and of the proud but still-primitive U.S. Weather Bureau at the turn of the century. Immensely confident of its nascent abilities to forecast the weather, but still burdened with untried processes and inefficient methods, the Weather Bureau failed to understand the magnitude of the storm throughout the crisis. As for Cline, his profess...

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