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WHAT STANDS IN A STORM

Name: WHAT STANDS IN A STORM
Author: Kim Cross
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6306-4

THREE DAYS IN THE WORST SUPERSTORM TO HIT THE SOUTH'S TORNADO ALLEY

by Kim Cross ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

Armchair storm chasers will find much to savor in this grippingly detailed, real-time chronicle of nature gone awry.

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A wind-swept re-creation of a deadly meteorological catastrophe conveyed through the perspectives of those who survived it.

Describing the 2011 three-day, multistate superstorm as “the biggest tornado outbreak in the history of recorded weather” could be considered an understatement to journalist and Southern Living editor Cross, who spent a year researching and documenting it. Building on a foundation of interviews, video records, frantic text messages and personal memorabilia, she intricately details the entire ordeal, from the formation of the first of hundreds of ferocious funnel clouds to the sheer destruction and human anguish left in their wakes. Springtime in the South means tornado season, an ominous period that “hovered like an unspoken question” over Southern states like Mississippi and Alabama, which suffered the greatest wrath from the disastrous superstorm that created over 350 tornadoes over a three-day period. Cross chronicles this historic weather event through the eyes of an affecting assortment of residents whose lives were touched by the natural disaster unfolding in their own backyards, interspersed with accompanying documentation of the storm’s increasing ferocity, which, in the end, created a “mile-wide swath of emptiness” where once-thriving neighborhoods stood. The author profiles promising University of Alabama students, families, fearless storm chasers, dedicated disaster responders and weathermen with their eyes on the blackened skies. Though topographical media and photographs aren’t included, Cross journalistically illustrates the storm’s unrelenting fury, heartbreaking aftermath and organized recovery efforts through dramatic firsthand stories, putting a human face on a tragic chain of events that claimed a devastating 348 casualties in 72 hours. The author also includes an “In Memoriam” section that lists the “Alabamians who lost their lives and…the people who face a world without them.”

Armchair storm chasers will find much to savor in this grippingly detailed, real-time chronicle of nature gone awry.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-4767-6306-4

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | NATURE | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

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Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynchingâ€”and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.