Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America

Following a rowdy band of storm chasers during tornado season, a writer delves deep into our fascination with catastrophic weather

Tornadoes maintain a primal hold on our collective imagination. But for a select band of scientists and weather enthusiasts, tornadoes are more than just fodder for Hollywood disaster films-they're an obsession. These "storm chasers" descend each spring on America's heartland to await an up-close view of nature's most violent forces. In Big Weather, Mark Svenvold puts us in the seat right next to these mavericks.

With a one-legged Ahab-like veteran chaser named Matt Biddle as his guide, Svenvold spends countless hours of "extreme waiting" and encounters several violent tornadoes, including one that destroys a small town in Kansas. Along the way he witnesses the circus that storm chasing has become and meets a motley cast of characters no novelist could ever dream up. Featured players include a North Carolina stock-car racer attempting to drive into a tornado and a trio of coeds hell-bent on a career in broadcast meteorology. During his three-month, 4,000-mile pursuit of cataclysmic storms, Svenvold also drops in on the weather media giants-AccuWeather and the Weather Channel-to explore the lucrative side of our cultural fixation on stormy skies.

With its riveting combination of devastating tornadoes, uniquely American eccentrics, and catastrophe commerce, Big Weather delivers both thrills and adventure. But it also digs deeper to offer an insightful and wryly observed portrait of a region of our nation and a vision of the weather fanatic that lives in all of us.

Mark Svenvold's first book of nonfiction, Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw, was a Book Sense 76 pick. Poet in residence at Fordham
University, Svenvold has won The Nation's "Discovery" Award for poetry. He lives in New York City with his wife, the novelist Martha McPhee, and two children, Livia and Jasper.

Mark Svenvold's first book of nonfiction, Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw, was a Book Sense 76 pick. Poet in residence at Fordham University, Svenvold has won The Nation's "Discovery" Award for poetry. He lives in New York City with his wife, the novelist Martha McPhee, and two children, Livia and Jasper.