Download Isaac's Storm AudioBook Free
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, over a late summer day in 1900, leaving at least 8,000 people dead. On that day, a wall of water surged over 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 fantastic San Francisco Earthquake of 1906-- yet the event has basically dissappeared from natural memory.
Isaac Cline, main professional weathermen emplyed by the federal 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 location 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 little plume of warm air over Africa, through its journey over the ocean as it drinks in vast levels of energy, to its arrival at the unsuspecting city. The audiobook describes the way the city, especially its children, welcomed the storm and the great deep-ocean swells that it cast after their beach--until extraordinary things started to happen.
Isaac's Storm is dependant on our latest knowledge 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 really is an unforgettable and timely story of the conflict between human hubris and the last great uncontrollable force--a cautionary tale for the millennium.
