9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best tornado narrative available !, December 1, 1998
This book is a must have for anybody interested in tornadoes. It tells in detail about the lives that were forever changed when a massive tornado ripped through Waco Texas in 1953. This is one of the few times a tornado has hit a downtown area head on. This may happen again, especially with the huge population growth. It is also rumored to be the theme of the sequel to the Twister ! movie.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The 1953 Waco tornado, January 27, 2010
I read this author's book about the 1900 Galveston Hurricane,
A Weekend in September and found it very compelling, so when I found "The Tornado" (originally published in 1977), I immediately bought it. This book tells the story of another natural disaster: the F5 tornado that flattened the business section of Waco, Texas and killed 114 people on May 11, 1953.
The heart of this book is formed from the survivors' narratives, but Weems doesn't jump immediately into this part of the story. Instead, he spends quite a bit of time describing the hours before Waco's downtown was churned into mud, bricks and bodies by the huge funnel cloud, as he worked on his father's cattle ranch, nearby.
Texas was in the grip of a drought that spring, and as he and his father repair the farm's windmill under darkening skies, Weems veers off into a description of the science, history, and mythology of meteorology.
In 1953, this author worked as a newspaper reporter, so when his editor called him up at the ranch, he grabbed his notebook, pencil, and camera, and started to track the path of the tornado. We are then treated to a history of Waco, and are over halfway through this book, and into Chapter 8 ("Approach on Downtown") before the F5 twister and the author head on into the city, itself.
The remainder of "The Tornado" focuses on the eyewitness accounts of the survivors, "based mostly on information given immediately afterward, when the details were still vivid." These survival stories are indeed gripping. I just wish the author had gotten to them a little sooner.
This book's black-and-white photographs show the destruction an F5 tornado can wreak on a large city's downtown. If you had somehow assumed that city centers are immune to Nature's most violent storms, "The Tornado" will definitely change your mind.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Book about Tornadoes. And I live near Waco!, November 20, 2000
If you haven't read this book you don't know what a best seller is about. It was pure fact, electric and mesmerizing. I couldn't put it down. The author interviewed the survivors first hand. Not some fictional made-for-TV slop.
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