From Publishers Weekly
Fish falling from the sky. Tornadoes plucking chickens. Lightning welding an unfortunate soldier into his sleeping bag when it struck the zipper. Weather is not only powerful and dangerous (as we've seen all too clearly of late) but just plain strange. This compendium of the weird drawn from climatologist Cerveny's database describes over 500 incidents, from lightning strikes to hurricanes, blizzards to dust devils. Cerveny groups the incidents by type of weather and then by type of occurrence. He gleefully jumps from the past (lightning burning the rings of six gold coins into the skin of a 19th-century victim) to the present (a young woman temporarily blinded when lightning struck her tongue stud), with little attempt to explain how weather works. This book is good for a quick read in a spare moment, but without any narrative to drive it, it turns into a mind-numbing procession of bizarre facts. But bring on tales of cross-shaped hail and a heat wave that roasted a town from 70 degrees Fahrenheit to 140 degrees in a matter of minutes: Cerveny is here to remind us that if you need something interesting to discuss, you can indeed just talk about the weather. Agent, Andrée Abecassis.
(Jan. 9) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In October 1947, in Marksville, Louisiana, hundreds of fish were falling from the sky. In November 1915, in Great Bend, Kansas, a tornado picked up five horses that landed unhurt a quarter mile from their barn. During a hurricane in 1938 along the eastern seaboard, residents discovered chickens with their feathers completely plucked by the wind. In Udall, Kansas, in 1955, a local barber was thrown out of bed, through a window, and into the street. He did not wake up. Cerveny, a professor who specializes in weather and climate, drew on his database of 8,000 recorded events to explain these occurrences. There are chapters on tornadoes, lightning, hail, rain, hurricanes, snow, wind, dust devils, and water spouts. He chronicles the oddest weather extremes (136 degrees in El Azizia, Libya, in 1922, and 129 below zero at the Russian research facility in Antarctica in 1983). The official world's record for a one-minute rainfall is 1.23 inches on July 4, 1956, in Avondale, Maryland. Cerveny's stories will captivate readers, or frighten them, or maybe a little of both.
George CohenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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