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Following an eccentric band of storm chasers during tornado season, a writer delves deep into our fascination with catastrophic weather
Why do some people chase the kind of storms that would send most people running for their lives? Why is it that devastating weather-and tornadoes in particular-maintain a primal hold on our collective imagination? How to account for the spectacular success of a company like the Weather Channel-not just a show, but an entire cable network with 86 million regular viewers, hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, and one abiding subject, the passing clouds?
With his guide Matt Biddle, an Ahab-like veteran storm chaser, Mark Svenvold draws a portrait of a culture enamored by extremes during a 6,000-mile journey through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. Along the way, the author encounters an assortment of characters out of a Fellini film: A duo named The Twister Sisters, from St. Cloud, Minnesota; a crowd-pleasing trio from CUPP (California University of Pennsylvania-at Pittsburgh); a team of chaser-scientists who have partnered with an IMAX film-maker from Los Angeles with an armor-plated truck; and a stock car racer from North Carolina whose goal is to drive through a tornado.
At the heart of the excitement are the awe-inspiring events themselves-a tornado that levels a small Nebraska town and the look back at the central Oklahoma tornado outbreak that included the single-most destructive tornado in US history. Similar weather disasters occur each spring in a kind of reverse lottery that has spawned a subculture of catastrophilia. Want to know what a tornado actually sounds like as it blows over or through your house? Big Weather answers this while also tracing the ways the sublime, in the classic sense, still has a profound claim upon our imagination.
Big Weather is a wryly observed meditation upon the weather as block-buster event that explores, with an ironic touch, our paradoxical relationship to the biggest story of our age-global warming-and the fate of the earth.
- Sales Rank: #2354256 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Henry Holt and Co.
- Published on: 2005-05-10
- Released on: 2005-04-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.48" h x 1.09" w x 6.16" l, .1 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
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
Review
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting Topic, But Too Much Meandering
By Charles Boyer
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.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Author of Big Weather Responds to Charles Doswell
By Mark Svenvold
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
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Poetic prose, wide ranging topics
By James
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.
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