Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

Read by the author

3 cassettes, approx. 5 hours

Now a New York Times bestseller, Isaac's Storm is the superb narrative of the extreme hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, on a late summer day in 1900, leaving at least 8,000 people dead. On that day, a wall of water surged across the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the burgeoning city of Galveston. The nameless hurricane remains the deadliest natural dissaster in American history, its final toll greater than the combined tolls of the Johnstown Flood and the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906-- yet the event has all but dissappeared from natural memory.

Isaac Cline, one of the first professional weathermen emplyed by the government, has gone on record as declaring that no storm could damage Galveston. Such fears, he wrote, were "an absurd delusion." By the time the hellish event was over, Cline would see whole portions of the city scraped clean of all structures and all life, and would himself endure an unbearable loss.

The other main character is the storm itself. Issac's Storm tracks the hurrican from its birth as a small plume of warm air over Africa, through its journey across the ocean as it drinks in vast amounts of energy, to its arrival at the unsuspecting city. The audiobook describes how the city, especially its children, welcomed the storm and the great deep-ocean swells that it cast upon their beach--until extraordinary things began to happen.

Isaac's Storm is based on our latest understanding of the physics and meteorology of hurricanes, on Cline's own formal reports and detailed personal account of the storm, as well as the recollections of scores of other witnesses. It is an unforgettable and timely story of the conflict between human hubris and the last great uncontrollable force--a cautionary tale for the millennium.