Storm
Written by George R. Stewart
Narrated by Patrick Lawlor
4/5
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About this audiobook
A violent storm sweeps through California, taking on a life of her own. Making her way from the Pacific Coast, she gains momentum as she approaches the Sierra and transforms into a blizzard of great strength, covering mountain ranges and roads with twenty feet of snow. Originally published in 1941, Storm is a rare combination of fiction and science by a master storyteller, drawing upon a deep knowledge of geography, meteorology, and human nature.
"In Storm we are far from freeways, from megapopulation, from sprawl, from beach TV, from stress, from road rage. And we are in touch with a much deeper reality. Of land and water and weather, of humans huddled together on the planet in a dark universe." —Ernest Callenbach, in the foreword
George R. Stewart
George R. Stewart (1895–1980) is the author of Pickett’s Charge, Names on the Land, and the International Fantasy Award–winner Earth Abides, as well as numerous other books of history, biography, and fiction. He taught for more than fifty years at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Earth Abides Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Storm
39 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The people are examples, generic, but each one shows how this great weather event affected many others like them. I read this many times over many years, and still felt it was new each reading.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I just wasted 3 hours that I will never get back. Boring beyond any belief. The narrator has one tone, and it's bad. Good to listen if you can't fall asleep. Five minutes, and you will be close to comatose.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This reads almost like a Tom Clancy novel (except Clancy came second) - lots of detailed minutiae building into a story that ultimately goes nowhere. For when it was written, I'm sure it was groundbreaking. I'd like to see what Stewart would have had to say about climate change.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Outstanding. A description of the birth of a storm and then its progress over 12 days. A wide variety of situations and people are involved. Each are introduced early in the book, but in many cases their significance does not become clear until later. Stewart is a master of describing a chain of events - two boys who shoot an electrical box on a pole which later lets the rain in and shorts the circuitry, disabling pumps and flooding an underpass. Or a tree that fell many years before and eventually slides off a rocky edge and brings down a phone line, disrupting a call. Or an owl that gets electrocuted on a power line, causing a weakness in the cable that later fails under the weight of ice from the storm. As others have noted, descriptions of life in California in 1941 are fascinating, including the human skill that was involved in interpreting weather charts and producing a forecast.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Follows a Pacific storm from it's inception off the coast of Japan to a several day wallop of California. We follow the impact of the storm from the Weather Service to the railroad, air service, US 40 over Donner Pass, and Army Corps of Engineers Sacramento office. There is a wayward owl and lineman, blown down tree, and lineman as well.Really happy to stumble across.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/512 days. A storm arises, crosses the Pacific, hits California ending a drought. The people who watch it and are responsible for dealing with its consequences in the Weather Bureau, highways, power, telephone, railroad, water management and air control are followed as well, but while the storm is named, Maria, only a few of the people are, and those whose inner workings are described as well as most others are referred to by job title often just initials.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A very enjoyable book about the history of a storm that descends upon Northern California. We see the inner workings of the Weather Bureau, from the moment that a small disturbance out in the far Pacific is noted by one junior weather tracker who thinks this little blip on his charts has potential to turn into something big. We see the inner workings of the people in the power and roads departments as they work to come to terms with what eventually becomes a fiercesome storm, indeed. But what makes this book particularly fascinating is the fact that, since it was written in 1941, what we are also getting is an intimate picture of the infrastructure of California at that time, and of the technology they had on hand. For example, with no weather satellites to access, weather trackers on land were dependent upon timely reports from ships at see as the to weather and atmospheric conditions they were experiencing. From this information, they put together their weather maps, piecing together this information as if working a jigsaw puzzle. In addition, Stewart writes with an engaging style, keeping the narrative flowing well and along the way creating interesting characters and individual tableaus, from the inter-office politics of the weather scientists to the struggles of work crews trying to keep mountain roads open in the storm, that range from humorous to tragic. A fine read.