David Laskin

[Edit]
So, my original review isn’t untrue, but my point of view has apparently expanded dramatically in the years since I wrote it. Re-reading the book now, I was struck numerous times by the complete absence of any non-white characters in Laskin’s telling of this story. In particular, this was the time period just after Native Americans had been forcibly removed from their lands onto reservations. Surely the blizzard must have had an impact on them? (A quick Google search turned up at show more least one very interesting anecdote—a group of Indian men who were hunting with their dog when the storm hit and ended up trapped inside the icy shell of a snowbank, only to be saved by that dog’s persistence.) Then too, in the detailed, rich description of the Europeans settling the plains, why was there not so much as a mention of the people they had to kill and displace in order to do so?

So . . . I’ll leave the original review untouched (below), but I wanted to say something, because these omissions (they had to be more than just oversights) bothered me immensely this time around. They should have bothered me the first time, but I simply wasn’t seeing clearly.
_______________________

Talk about a page-turner. This is one of those books where you read the blurbs (which say things like “terrifying but beautifully written” and “reads like a thriller”) after you’ve read the book, and you think “Yeah, that’s about right.” This is a non-fiction account of the blizzard that swept over the Great Plains on January 12, 1888. It was an event that defined the consciousness of a broad area of the nation, and continues to define it to this day. The story itself is heartrending: the first warm, mild morning in weeks turned instantly into one of the coldest, deadliest blizzards of all time. Farmers were caught in their fields, ranchers were caught tending to their animals. Worst of all, children were caught in schoolhouses, many of which could not provide adequate shelter through such a storm. By the time January 13 rolled around, the prairie was scattered with hundreds of dead bodies, many of them children (thus the name given to the blizzard, from which the book takes its title). A telling excerpt:

Today, aside from a few fine marble headstones in country graveyards and the occasionial roadside historical marker, not a trace of the blizzard of 1888 remains on the prairie. Yet in the imagination and identity of the region, the storm is as sharply etched as ever: This is a place where blizzards kill children on their way home from school.

[Emphasis his.]

Laskin does a remarkable job with the book. The reasons for the blizzard’s power and deadliness are complicated, bound up not just in the weather itself but in the history of the region (and the U.S. in general), in patterns of European migration, in military affairs, even in religion. The author weaves these lines together into a gripping story; it’s difficult to put the book down, even as the text moves in and out of such disparate subjects. I should add that his writing was good enough to make the story of a blizzard tangible to me even as I read it on 90° days in June.

This is one of the two best books I’ve read all year, and one of the best I’ve ever read period. It’s books like this that make me love the historical-nonfiction genre. And it’s stories like this that, in spite of themselves, bind me to the Great Plains. show less

It's obvious that the author is a meteorological nerd and it overwhelms the book. The anecdotal tales are the highlight, and revealing this horrible incident is a justification for writing it. I also enjoyed the back stories of the Norwegian immigrants, in these fraught anti-immigrant days of the worst president ever. But all the arcane weather data prevented my absorption in the narrative.

Family sagas, both fiction and non, are among my favorite genres. This one has three unique branches: the Kaganoviches, a Jewish family from the Pale of Settlement, sends brave emigrants to Palestine and to NYC, leaving the doomed group to be murdered by Nazis and their Lithuanian accomplices. The author gives equal weight and time to each story, and they are pretty remarkable: the Palestinians are pioneers, but complicit in the destruction of Bedouin and Arab villages; the Americans launch show more the Maidenform Bra Company but don't do much to heed the desperate calls from the old country, and the dead speak only through diaries of the few neighbors who survivored the Holocaust.

In another response to the ever-puzzling "Why did the Jews put up so little resistance?", there's a fascinating and new-to-me chapter on the expectations of the Kaganoviches living in Volozhin, who'd been through a German invasion back in 1918 and were not treated any worse by those invaders than they were by the Russian/Polish/Romanian Christians who constantly conducted progroms.

Well-written and researched, the "Notes" section alone is riveting. Highly recommended. show less

This is a very, very good book and one that I will re-read at some point to re-capture the details that escaped on the first go round. And it was also delightful to read a weather geek explain the phenomenon that caused this catastrophic blizzard: high pressure, low pressure, and how they work. Maybe someday I'll understand that aspect!

Laskin does a phenomenal job researching the lives of the families caught up in this push into the Western US plains. He researches the history and places show more where 5 or 6 families originated, their customs, reasons for making the voyage, experiences to get to their ports, and other similar stories from the time. So we get to know some families, know that they had stories similar to other people from the same region or on the same transport, and they were not plucked up and placed in the Dakotas or Nebraska out of thin air.

There is a great deal of research into early American weather forecasting, especially what worked and what didn't. And the Signal Corps and Lieutenant Woodruff, who was an active duty soldier in charge of the weather forecasting and relaying messages East from the various points in Montana and the Great Plains, interpreting them, and drawing them on a map ready for the telegraph machines.

When the storm hits, Laskin again goes into detail about the snow and ice and crystals, as well as what extreme cold does to the human body based on survivors' stories and medical evidence. It is also important to know, and I didn't, that there were survivors who lasted the night, only to die the next morning when the blood from their freezing limbs began to circulate around their hearts.

So it's a heart-wrenching historical account, very similar to "Isaac's Storm" and tales about the Northwest Passage, of people who left one land and set of difficult circumstances for hope of a better life, only to have that life changed so tragically. show less