The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin

Book Overview

"David Laskin deploys historical fact of the finest grain to tell the story of a monstrous blizzard that caught the settlers of the Great Plains utterly by surprise. . . . This is a book best read... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060520760
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.8" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

A PERFECT Non-fiction Weather Book!

I ordered this book as soon as it came out; I have a David Laskin book written a few years ago, and it's really good. But THIS BOOK- well, I would have to say that it's in my Top 10 of Favorite Books, and that's saying a lot, because I breathe books as though they were air....if I couldn't read, I would die. FANTASTIC book. The imagery; the reality of those lives on the Plains, depending as they did upon things that to us today would seem quite trivial, with all of our modern conveniences. And then, from the frigid HELLS of the Siberian and Canadian Arctic, comes sweeping down a 200 year blizzard upon them, no warning, no real protection, and so quickly building into a maelstrom of blinding, stinging and freezing on contact with skin and all else, that many, if not most of the schoolchildren whose schools were released around the same time, just didn't stand a chance, even the ones who lived so close to the schoolhouse that in good weather, they could see it from home. This book cries out to be read......a piece of American history that brings home to us what winters could be like to live through, on the Great American Plains, and told in a way that you can visualize the true tale of the families, handing down the story from generation through generation, we hope in front of a cozy fire in the hearth. Touché, David Laskin!

A must for history and weather fans

Like Isaac's Storm (Erik Larson) before it, The Children's Blizzard takes us into a nearly forgotton place in American history and slaps us with the almost casual brutality of life before modern meteorology. David Laskin has researched the subject of the blizzard of 1888 in meticulous fashion and we can't help but be impressed with his scholarship. Laskin has previously written on meteorology and he has a way of making the capricious nature of the atmosphere highly accessible. Readers should be warned that Laskin is unsparing in his depiction of the death by exposure of children trapped in the storm. If you've read "To Build a Fire" by Jack London (whom he credits) you'll have a small idea of what these children go through. Images will haunt you: Parents dragging their frozen children into the house to thaw by the fire so their contorted bodies will fit into tiny coffins. Even those who survive must endure gruesome injuries. This is history and it must be told. But one wonders what ever made these settlers think such a life was worth the hardships. It was a rare family that had not lost children, even before the great blizzard. A minor criticism of The Children's Blizzard is its tendency, especially early, to focus on historical minutiae. Emphasis on the life of plains settlers before they left Europe drags down the early narrative. Recommended, but not for the easily disturbed reader.