The Storm of the Century by Al Roker

 The Storm of the Century: Tragedy, Heroism Survival, and the Epic True Story of America's Deadliest Natural Disaster: The Great Gulf Hurricane of 1900.  William Morrow, 2015.  Adult Nonfiction.


Although it is hard to read a book about the great Galveston storm of 1900 without thinking about the excellent title by Erik Larson, Al Roker does an interesting job of mining new stories and presenting the story from his own perspective.  Although the book has no footnotes, it does present a bibliography. Roker has mined the oral histories collected by Collins in 2004 for authentic voices of some of  the community's African American residents. Roker's passion for weather: how it works, how it is reported, how can be predicted, etc. comes together with the history to determine who knew about the storm in 1900 and how residents were not prepared or given notice about the coming storm.  He does a good job of telling about another weatherman, Isaac Cline and his brother, Joseph, and how the storm impacted their lives and careers. The book does not end with the storm itself, but goes on to tell of the aftermath: 10,000 or more lost, $20 million in damages, and the building of the Galveston seawall which was said to rival the building of the ancient Wonders of the World.  Included in the people who rushed to the island were  nurse  and founder of the Red Cross, Clara Barton, and Annie Laurie (Winifred Black), a reported sent by Hearst newspapers to cover the story. Neither had ever seen such devastation and they helped improvise a national rescue relief effort on a huge scale and helped bring new ideas about equality for women. Even after a hundred years, the numbers, the hubris, the miles and the stories exceed our expectations and imaginations and are hard to believe.