Customer Reviews

Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I'm very into the weather and have chased a storm or two in my exciting lifetime. Nevertheless, I am always interested in reading about the death defying adventures of other lunatics and thought this book would be just the thing. I've read Svenvold before (some book about a singular lunatic) and he writes with some degree of skill. Now...for this book.

The author covers the exploits of several tornado chasers over a month. The adventure writing is minimal as the author spends too much time trying to analyze the storm chaser mentality (and usually with a holier-saner than thou attitude--something I found annoying). He (Svenvold) also feels compelled (every 20 pages or so) to interject his discontent with the US policy in Iraq and US leadership. What the situation in Iraq has to do with tornadoes in the Midwest US is beyond me. The author appears disdainful of his subjects and seems a bit of a snob to me. Which is amusing since he misspells Bob Seger's name three times on page 175. Barely recommended to those who can skim when reading. HHD>.

I don't know why it's taken me so long to get around to doing this, but here goes. I wrote Big Weather and am bemused but not surprised by the intellectually dishonest review by Charles Doswell III, who, as a university professor, should know better than to start with an attack ad hominem, the lowest form of argument--he calls me a carpet-bagger. Things don't improve from there. It's not a review. It's a psuedo-review, a personal attack posing as a review, which is just one of the reasons why it's dishonest.

I wrote Big Weather because I was curious about why, as a culture, we seem so fascinated by catastrophic weather. I wanted to know why it was that a company like The Weather Channel could exist in the first place. I was following a line of thought first developed in 1962 by Daniel Boorstin, in his book The Image: A Guide to Psuedo-Events in America, in which Boorstin warns about a great menace that was emerging then in American culture. He used that word, "menace," and the menace wasn't poverty or war or class division, or anything like that. It was, as he called it, "unreality." The problem of "unreality" in our culture. He identified three areas in culture that are not prone to advertising or political manipulation--the first was crime reporting, the second was sports, and the third was the weather. The weather has become for us a base-line measure for what's real. You can create a company like The Weather Channel, which spins the weather to a fare-the-well, but if a storm decides to wipe the Weather Channel off the earth, there's nothing anyone can do about it. It's the unreal that gives us so much trouble, that seems to be something it isn't, that seems to be spontaneous but turns out to have been orchestrated for other reasons, much like Charles Doswell's "review," for instance.

My point is this: I wrote Big Weather because I was pursuing a line of intellectual and artistic thought that meant something important to me, personally, and seemed to touch many other people as well, not just those who were drawn, like me to the center of the United States to witness large storms. I found it strange that we seemed so fixated by catastrophic weather, on the one hand, but couldn't seem to get off the dime about climate change (this was in 2004). I know weather isn't the same thing as climate, but global warming seemed to be just about the biggest big weather story of them all. I had to address it at some point and to address the campaign of mis-information about global warming that was waged so successfully by the Bush Administration. Doing that really seemed to annoy some reviewers of this book. Wow. Struck a nerve, did I? The truth, of course, came out soon after the publication of my book, that Bush administration political appointees, many with no scientific credentials, doctored or edited scientific reports, slowed down research, and created a smoke screen in the debate about global warming. The book also was and is an inquiry into how the sublime, the terrifying disorienting force of nature, in this case, attracts us, still speaks to us, from across the centuries. I was, also, interested in reporting a debased kind of sublime as well--a commodified sublime which I called "catastrophilia." Anyway, I hope you can see that my motives were good. And if it sounds too bookish and brainy, well, I filled Big Weather with enough chasing and other forms of malarkey to keep me amused, at any rate, and I hope you as well. Four years later, I'm still very, very proud of this book and, aside from a few silly mistakes that inevitably escape one's best effort to be as accurate as possible, I stand by everything that I say in it.

The field of severe storm weather is filled with wonderful and fascinating people, but it's not big enough, it seems, to allow me and Charles Doswell's ego to coexist. Now we're getting closer to the truth, I suspect. Too bad his psuedo-review is the first thing you see when you inquire into Big Weather. Try reading the actual book. I'm not saying this because it's going to make me any money. It won't. The book's long out of print. But you can still get it and read it, either in the library or through a used book store on Amazon, or elsewhere. Give it a try. There's plenty to keep you engaged, but if you're looking only for entertainment without reflection, then I'll be the first to suggest that you try another book instead.

Mark Svenvold

I received this book as a gift, thumbed through the first few pages and then promptly put it in our "on the way to the thrift store" bin. In what must have been a desperate moment many days later, I retrieved the book and began giving it a fair reading. I am glad I did.

If you want to see pictures of a close-up tornado, or read about seat-of-your-pants storm chasing action, this is not the book for you. The same can be said if you are wanting to learn something important about how storms work, or why some storms produce tornadoes while the vast majority do not. If, however, you are interested in how one rather philosophical--if sometimes tangetial and longwinded--author interprets the diverse community of tornado chasers, then this will be an excellent read.

As a storm chaser who knows a few other storm chasers, I know exactly where I can go to find amazing photographs, detailed chase accounts, self-promotion and fist-pumping chaser debauchery. I am thankful Svenvold's book was devoid of most of those elements. Instead, the author provides us with a reflection we rarely get from within the community: we are clowns, geeks and loners--people who will sit on their bums for 12 hours in order to have a one-in-ten chance of seeing a tornado.

Even though this portrayal of the community is a gross generalization, we have to remember that this is how Svenvold saw it, and if he hadn't seen some comic element, he wouldn't have a book. You can not fault someone for making observations and having opinions. If I chose to ride along with a bunch of birdwatchers for a summer, I suppose I'd have some opinions about them, in general, too.

The book is at its strongest when it involves us in the lives of its characters, and when it tells us stories. You will get a good dose of that, although it would have been nice to see a little more text devoted to some of the still-active pioneers of storm chasing, rather than brushing them aside as historical artifacts. The strength of the book wanes some when Svenvold reaches for analogies, especially when the analogies are pedantic and esoteric. I must admit to being amused by his meteorologist-as-porn-star metaphor, however, even though he gave it too much treatment.

With the exception of the "Twister Sisters," whom Svenvold gave favorable coverage, some readers may be put off by his characterization of women in meteorology, especially those who choose careers in television. In addition, the author knows very little about climatology yet opts for a multi-chapter diatribe on Global Warming, which isn't a good fit for the book because it has a weaker statistical association with tornadoes than just about any other meteorological phenomenon (like heat waves, for example).

All-in-all though, I found the book entertaining and worthwhile. If you want an interesting take on the storm chasing subculture, get it; if you want facts, photographs and drama, do not.

If you buy this book based on the cover or subtitle, you will have been misled. While perhaps half of this book is based on a few week's chasing that Svenvold did in May of 2004, much of the rest of the book is not about chasing at all. Svenvold's background is literary, and much of the book reads like literary criticism rather than a work on storm chasing. Like much literary criticism it suffers from a lack of focus, and the feeling that the author is trying to show off his vocabulary. An editor that cared about the book structure would have cut out much off the irrelevant verbiage and asked that the author replace it with text salient to the topic. Like Larry McMurtry, Svenvold brings the ghost of social critic Walter Benjamin into Tornado Alley, although to even less purpose. It's unfortunate that Svenvold drifts off into various political and literary diatribes, because when he is writing about chasing it's actually quite well-written and compelling, although perhaps too judgmental considering his lack of real knowledge of the cast of players. His comments about some coeds from the California University of Pennsylvania he meets along the way are hurtful and are obviously based on bias and not evidence. He makes similar value judgments about other people, corporations and countries, all from a very one-dimensional perspective. There are various other errors and inaccuracies scattered throughout the book, which can at least partly be ascribed to his unfocused approach. Parts of this book are very good, but unfortunately you will have to wade through the rest of it to find those parts.

This is an excellent book, much deeper than the other of the weather-related books. Not only does it tell the science and the story of extreme weather, it delves into the underlying way the weather affects our joint psyche and what our fascination with catastrophe means about ourselves. Svenvold's storm-chasing characters reveal an Americana straight out of a PT Barnum asemblage. The author is gifted with words and with the ability to see his subject in broader contexts.

Recently checked this out from my library... I have to ask if the author or the publisher did any proofing or fact-checking? The Palm Sunday Super Outbreak of 1974? Pretty sure those were two seperate outbreaks... Sixteen F5's in Kansas since 1950? Not even close! Kobe Bryant's winning shot vs San Antonio...no, that was Derek Fisher who hit that shot.

While some my enjoy his lengthy philosophical ramblings, I do not... this book could be cut in half, and easily! By the third or fourth chapter I just began skipping the paragraphs and pages that had nothing to do with storm chasing.

That's not to say the book is a total dud, there are good sections and vivid descriptions of people and storms for sure, but it's too long-winded and inaccurate to give anything more than two stars.

Big Weather is a lot about weather and a little about weather, all at the same time. How come? Because Mark Svenvold can describe physical phenomena in prose approaching poetry, and the topic allows him to introduce the reader to multiple other venues.
The title attracts those of us who need to deal with weather. I fly light airplanes and taught weather as a major chapter in aviation ground school class curricula. Even so, tornadoes are a fish pilots do not swim with. We race the other way, like herring trying to fly when the whales arrive to corral them with air bubbles. So on a daily basis, pilots need to know more about, for example, the Current Icing Potential on the ADDS Web, or the convective SIGMETS, which describe the wide range of turbulence generators.
But whatever makes you open Big Weather, you will find, in the first paragraph of page one, the rich ability of a poet to describe the factual in impressionistic ways.
A few pages later, you will meet Matt Biddle, his hero.
And it keeps getting better. Want to know about Chaos? Svenvold will tell you about Lorenz, and then you can read James Gleick.
His mention of Heisenberg might remind you that Werner was once asked if he had any questions for God. He responded "Yes, I will ask him to explain relativity and turbulence, and I think he will be able to explain relativity".
Or, when Svenvold brings up Pliny the Elder, describing a vortex, you can pick up John Mc Phee's "Control of Nature" and read how Pliny dropped dead when Vesuvius erupted under his nose.
Think tornadoes are all violence? Svenvold will connect you with their sublime elements, and with Dionysius Longinus, sublime's first champion.
Science, art, science, literature, science, psychology, geography, history, philosophy. On and on it goes.
Elmer Mc Curdy is another good yarn. Get that too.