Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America (Hardcover)

by Mark Svenvold (Author) "Air is water's ghost, flowing, like water, through its seasons..." (more)
Key Phrases: storm spotters, many chasers, storm chasing, Oklahoma City, National Weather Service, Sean Casey (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In this beguiling study of meteorology and its discontents, Svenvold, a poet and author of Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw, spends the month of May in the colorful caravan of tornado chasers as they pore over weather data in strip-mall parking lots, drive thousands of miles through the Oklahoma-Nebraska corridor searching for thunderheads and agonize over which of the many storm clouds darkening the horizon to pursue. It's a classic American mixture of high-tech fetishism and barnstorming entertainment, populated by sober meteorologists with the latest forecasting gadgetry and jargon, an IMAX filmmaker hoping to drive his tanklike "Tornado Intercept Vehicle" into the whirlwind and local weathercasters who stage each tornado watch as a "low-tech reality show the size of central Kansas." The author situates it in the cult of "catastrophilia," a "commodified version of the... sublime" visible in everything from "torn porn" videos to the Weather Channel's marketing of weather as consumer accouterment. Svenvold's usually engaging chronicle of "extreme waiting" for funnel clouds occasionally lapses into extreme writing ("Here was the anti-storm, weather as non-weather," he broods during an unwelcome bout of clear skies), and his impulse to suck up all information in his path sometimes leads to digressions. But his wry, supple prose vividly captures a heartland made up of the awe-inspiring and the absurd. Agent, Sarah Chalfant. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Svenvold is poet-in-residence at Fordham University, and his poetic pedigree is evident on every page of this exploration of the strange, seductive lure of catastrophic weather: "Air is water's ghost, flowing, like water, through its seasons." Svenvold tagged along with one veteran storm chaser, Matt Biddle, in 2004, but this isn't merely a biography of Biddle. It's a look at the world in which he lives, a world filled with scientists and mavericks and hucksters. For some, chasing tornadoes is a career; for others, like stock-car-racer Steve Green (who saw a business opportunity in driving headlong into a tornado), it offers a chance to make a buck. For others, like Biddle, it's an obsession. If you're a fan of movies about extreme weather (such as 1995's Twister, which has a decidedly mixed reputation in storm-chasing circles), you'll definitely want to give this book a read. But its appeal is not limited to those with a hankering for climatological disaster: the author's approach, his way of digging under the surface to explore the dreams and motivations of these unusual men and women, takes the book out of its niche and puts it right up there beside such best-selling narrative nonfiction as Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm (1997), a book to which Svenvold devotes two pages of admiring praise, and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (1997). David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (April 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805076468
• ISBN-13: 978-0805076462
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,135,550 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Review of Big Weather, June 14, 2005

By	Charles Doswell III (Norman, OK USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is the product of another "carpetbagger" - someone migrating temporarily into the world of storm chasing, doing his research, putting down his thoughts on what he's seen, and then packing his bags, off onto some new topic to write about and sell yet another book. Mark Svenvold is, like Keay Davidson, a professional writer and a reasonably good one, at that (albeit, with a love for the occasional word that will send some readers off to their dictionaries). He had the benefit of an extended relationship with my friend, Matt Biddle, who is the obvious "star" of this book. Many of the book's characters are friends, colleagues, or acquaintances of mine - a not unexpected result, given the nominal topic. For the most part, Mr. Svenvold has been reasonably accurate in portraying at least the superficial aspects of these characters. Unlike Matt Biddle's, however, most of his characterizations are uniformly confined to the superficial. He did seem to find certain fringe characters compelling enough to delve into some details - for example: Sean Casey of IMAX and "Bushrag" fame with his absurd "Tornado Intercept Vehicle" and Steve Green, who seems to have some vague connection with NASCAR, with his different but equally absurd "Tornado Attack" vehicle - neither of which are known to me, personally. Some others (e.g., Warren Faidley, Shane Adams, and a few others) get some extended treatment. While Mr. Svenvold seems overtly sympathetic to some of the "fringe element" chasers, I got from him an overriding feeling of his thinly-veiled contempt for most of the characters, except perhaps for Matt Biddle and a select few.
Mr. Svenvold seems to be unable to establish a real focus for this book. Nominally, he claims it was motivated by a scary storm experience while in a motel in El Reno, OK, but this doesn't seem to be much of a thread to tie together the disparate parts of the book. Like many outsiders, he seems to be driven by a need to understand storm chasers - a need that often drives the media when they interview us. Within the book, with Matt Biddle's help, Mr. Svenvold has manged to winkle out many of the strange and even contradictory aspects of storm chasers, including our penchant for what he refers to as MOPE (minimal optimism, pessimistically engaged), and the widespread "geekiness" of chasers. As an outsider, of course, he remains mystified by chaser jargon and the technical aspects of the storm chase process and seems to be expressing some frustration (and contempt) about his necessary exclusion from the technical conversations.
Where he goes seriously astray in this book, in my opinion, is his marked tendency to wander off-topic, especially into abstract and obscure philosophical musings about things that have little or nothing to do with storm chasing. The book is liberally laced with such diversions (including global climate change, religion, and various American culture topics), often going on and on for many pages, apparently advertising the author's substantial scholarly background work, but serving mostly to motivate me to skip lightly through this book. For someone interested in storm chasers, this predominantly dark vision of the philosophical issues underlying storm chasing is rather more pretentious than illuminating.
I think the book will sell and it does contain elements that offer some limited insight into storm chasing (e.g. "extreme sitting" - p. 108, or "extreme waiting" - p. 132), but it's similar to Mr. Davidson's efforts - it fails to provide much more than superficial insight into either storms or storm chasing. There seems to be a trend among writers to try to psychoanalyze chasers, and this book is no exception. This is an apparently necessary result of a book written by an outsider who views chasing as essentially crazy activity. Who knows what history will say about storm chasers? Is storm chasing simply a temporary phenomenon resulting from the concatenation of cheap gasoline (see Ch. 11) and extensive highways with a culture dominated by selfishness and "catastrophilia" (see Ch. 4 for Svenvold's explanation of this term he has coined)? Perhaps, but in my view, chasers always have been a diverse group and trying to "explain" them collectively by parading a set of individual characters in front of the reader, as Mr. Svenvold does, is not likely ever to be successful at helping non-chasers grasp what chasing is about.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating topic, ho-hum execution, March 17, 2007

By	guitarchick24 (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America (Owl/John MacRae Books) (Paperback)

In "Big Weather," Mark Svenvold recalls the time he spent in 2004 tagging along with veteran storm chaser Matt Biddle. The book is meant to be about storm chaser culture and associated elements, but uneven storytelling mars what would otherwise be a very cool book.

Svenvold is a poet-in-residence at Fordham University, and it shows. In some cases (such as Chapter 4: Catastrophilia), it shows a little too much. When Svenvold is talking about being on a chase, or the people who are part of and/or affected by chase culture, he's great. When he tries to get flowery, it bogs down the book. I'm sure there was a point to Chapter 4; I just wish he had gotten to it sooner, with a clear path to it.

And that's the overall problem with "Big Weather." For a topic that is, at its essence, unpredictable, crazy, and hold-your-breath heart stopping, he doesn't always convey that. I know that there's a lot of waiting associated with chasing, but Svenvold made storm chasing seem downright dreamy. I think the book would have been better if he had stuck with the journalistic, straight-to-the-point style he used when describing different chase events.

I don't agree with other reviewers that say he is anti-Christian, anti-Bush, or anti-other chasers. I think he was just trying to be objective while observing the people who not only live in Tornado Alley, but are also residents of the Bible Belt. Perhaps the book would have been less offensive if he had been more objective, but I don't think that's his style.

One place where I did think he was offensive (or at least borderline) was his constant referral to the people in the chasing industry as "geeks" or "dorks." I wasn't sure if that was an in-joke he was repeating or if he was being purposely derogatory.

I think, in a way, this was meant to be Svenvold's "expose" type book, just like recent bestsellers "The Nanny Diaries" or "The Devil Wears Prada," except, of course, he didn't try to gloss his experiences by hiding them in fiction. It might have been a more interesting read if he did.

Overall, it's worth checking it out from the library. But there are better memoirs out there that are worth savoring and keeping.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Topic, But Too Much Meandering, June 7, 2005

By	Charles A. Boyer (North Carolina) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm not involved in storm chasing, other than watching it on television and now, thanks to some of the names that Mark Svenvold mentions in his book, on their web sites.

There's an interesting story that Svenvold writes on in the book, the one where a storm chaser from Texas and a companion have a tornado form atop them, or at least very, very close to the vehicle that they were travelling in. Anyway, I went to the fellow's website, and sure enough, there was a video of the chase that Svenvold wrote of. In his account, Svenvold states that the female passenger was near-hysterical. But, when watching the video, the one that Svenvold gets his story from, you get the idea that she was less hysterical than merely quite excited -- and from there, the story takes a different tone than the one the way that it was written.

At any rate, there are some good descriptions of those that are involved with storm chasing. The good thing is that in this modern age, you can back check the author and see the other side of the story on the internet. From there, draw your own conclusions. Read the book, then hit Google.

I could have done without the preaching that this book does, and would enjoy reading another book about this subject by an author like Sebastian Junger or perhaps Jon Krakhauer. While Svenvold at times elicits their tones and narratives, he fails at their keen analysis and ability to keep asides relevant to the point at hand.