Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful Book!
Review: I admit it. I am a severe weather junkie. Hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, tidal waves, earthquakes-any drama wrought by nature appeals to me. In fact, I found this book by accident when looking for a book on the 1888 blizzard.
Many people who write nonfiction stories such as this rely on their experience as a journalist (i.e.; Sebastian Junger who wrote The Perfect Storm). Instead, Scotti, a fiction author of thrillers, sets the book up like a novel. Yes, there are a lot of meteorological details but it's the human drama that she succeeds with best. Using newspaper accounts and interviews with survivors, Scotti describes the "heartbreak, heroism, the incredible luck and the tragic misfortune of individuals and families."One of the reasons it took me so long to read this book was that I was continually looking up pictures and info on the internet and looking at maps. This storm wreaked havoc on all of New England, but was particularly devastating to Rhode Island, wiping one little community completely off the map. Scotti takes these personal stories and weaves them together in a gripping way that keeps the reader turning the page at a feverish pace by the end trying to find out the fate of the families she writes about.
Rating:
Summary: The Storm of the Century
Review: I started reading this book on Saturday and was finished on Monday morning. It completely held my interest. I enjoyed the human element and couldn't wait to find out what happened to the many people in this devasting hurricane. Each account was breath-taking. It makes me want to know more...I am recommending this book to everyone I come in contact with. That anyone lived through this storm was amazing. It makes you realize what is really important in life. I enjoyed the author's telling of this story.
Rating:
Summary: Great Read
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this one. After hearing my parents talk about the big one in 1938 for so many years, this book brought it all together. The unexpected, frightening, and devastating effects of the storm came alive for me while reading it.
I would highly recommend this one for all New Englanders!
Rating:
Summary: Exceptionally well written account of a horrifying disaster
Review: Like the author R.A. Scotti, I am a native Rhode Islander who grew up hearing stories of the great Hurricane of 1938. Take just one look at the photograph on the cover of "Sudden Sea" and you will immediately appreciate the terror that overtook people on that steamy September afternoon. In Rhode Island, it had been a mostly sunny but hot day. All of the sudden the sky turned an ominous yellow. And within a very short time driving rains and winds of well over 100 MPH were pounding the area. And no one, not one single person, had any idea it was coming!
Having read a number of books on disasters, I have found that most disasters are usually a convergence of any number of unfortunate circumstances. And so it was on Long Island and throughout much of New England on that fateful day. While there was some limited ability to forecast hurricanes in those days, no one was prepared for, nor could they have predicted the path, the speed or the destructive potential of this monster storm. The simple fact of the matter is that even in this day and age with all of our sophisticated equipment, experts agree that they cannot forecast the behavior of a hurricane more than 24 hours in advance.
R.A. Scotti introduces the reader to a number of families who found themselves suddenly caught up in the Hurricane of 1938. They are a pretty diverse bunch, ranging from well-heeled old money clans on the Hamptons to working class stiffs who owned small cottages on the Rhode Island coast. Some of her subjects would not make it through that afternoon. And for those lucky enough to survive life would never be the same. For instance, in one area in Charlestown RI on the southern RI coast there were 700 summer homes at 3:00 that afternoon. By the time the storm moved away around sunset there was absolutely nothing left! And this was not a unique scenario by any means. It was repeated over and over again throughout southern New England. The storm would claim over 700 people and injure 2000 more. The hurricane cost more than $4.7 billon (with a "b") in todays dollars. This hurricane was so powerful and fast moving that hurricane winds were felt as far north as Burlington, Vermont.
I do a great deal of reading about history, politics and current events. I would have to say that this is the best written book I have read this year. R.A. Scotti is a real wordsmith and I really appreciated her abilty to turn a phrase. I could not put this one down. Very highly recommended!!!
Rating: 
Summary: A disappoinment
Review: R. A. Scotti blatently rips off her predecessors' accounts of the 1938 Hurricane, particularly Everett Allen's. She is writing for the obese Oprah's Book Club-following 40-something American woman who likes Crystal Light, Julia Roberts, and People magazine. No analysis in Sudden Storm is original; nearly everything Scotti introduces can be found in an earlier work. To the uneducated reader Scotti tells a wonderful and exciting tale, but to anyone who's familiar with the history beind the 1938 Hurricane, Sudden Storm is a pathetic attempt to cash in on the trend of thick New England middle-aged women's sad hobby of glazing over history and then swallowing the commercial output (Sudden Storm) like they would a hot Krispy Kreme.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting book on well-known and published hurricane
Review: The beginning of the book hooked me...but somewhere mid-stream it became a hard read...it took about 6 sittings to read the 240ish page book. Meteorology was barely touched upon, which is fine, considering the Weather Bureau was only taking surface observations at the time and any other deductions would be mere guess-work. Besides, non-mets usually make all kinds of errors, such as assuming the Saffir-Simpson Scale was in use (I don't even think the term "Great Hurricane" had been coined as of that time.) One of the forecasters involved actually became one of the best-skilled hurricane forecasters around...it would have been nice if she expounded on his later career, but no matter. It seemed like the author tried too hard to weave the individual stories together, and I got lost when going back and forth from different spots in Rhode Island and Long Island. I felt like I was adrift in the storm myself. I did like how she followed up on the characters who survived...that was a nice touch. If you're interested in southern New England and weather, this should be a good buy.
Rating: 
Summary: The Terrific Tale Almost Tells Itself
Review: The Great Hurricane of 1938 was a wonderful choice for author R.A. Scotti to have selected as it would be hard not to have a successful tale to tell with a story of such inherent drama. The author does an admirable job in Sudden Sea of letting the story tell itself without getting too much in the way. The few small lapses (the thinly set context for this time and place is perhaps one misstep) are quickly erased as the hurricane barrels its way up the coast. The author wisely selects her scenes and the reader is captured by the tension of the life-and-death struggles of the survivors judiciously highlighted. This book is a little in the shadows next to a classic like Isaac's Storm but it still provides a great, late night of nail-biting (and very often quite moving) reading.
Rating:
Summary: details not quite right
Review: This book is very readable, interesting and engaging. The story is gripping, however the author takes liberties with some of the details and stretches others - for example, one person mentioned in the story supposedly explored out West when it was the wild west, yet when his age is given, he would not yet have been born when the west was still wild! I suppose you could call it literary licence but some of these details just don't add up. Was this hurricane really the only category 5 to hit the US? What about the Galveston Hurricane in 1900? This is disappointing and confusing to me, but the subject matter is enough to carry the book.
Rating:
Summary: I was tossed about a bit
Review: This is a fascinating story about a facinatingly destructive hurricane. The author's build-up to the hurricane is masterful, and the personal drama of the individuals made the tragedy more gripping. However, at times it was a very difficult task to follow the story; the author seemed to hop from locale to locale, and from personal story to personal story - back and forth, geographically and chronologically. I felt as if I had to glance back to previous pages to recall who she was writing about and where these people were. Once I got my bearings (and used the map in the book), I was able to more fully enjoy the account. It's hard to fathom the depths of destruction without the individualized human stories, so the value of the author's method of writing outweighs the mental gymnastics I went through to follow the tale. Some of the accounts are simply stunning and almost incomprehensible. All in all, it truly is a gripping tale and well worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: Sudden storm sends shockwaves to end summer on somber note
Review: This is nice read, an almost pleasant (but, strangely, not gripping) saga of the great New England Hurricane of September 21,1938. Much of the focus of the storm and the story is on the wealthy Hampton areas of Long Island and the Newport area of Rhode Island. Scotti sets the time and place well: the end of the Depression (with the damage still evident), the brewing war in Europe, and the start of the university school year. This storm came not only at an unusual time but also at unusual places. Much of the damage to homes is the result of wealthy people taking advantage of splendid if dangerous views of the ocean. Some of the dead are domestics left behind to shutter summer homes. "Sea" offers a clear companion and comparison to "Isaac's Storm," the epic of the Galveston hurricane of 1900. "Sea" is able to focus much more on the human element of the catastrophe, using interviews with survivors, photographs (fourteen glossy pages), and records that were just not kept in or saved from 1900. Survivors are alive today. "Sea" is more about the people who fought, including some who survived, the storm. In "Sea," a smug senior forecaster in Washington, DC dismisses the hurricane forecast of an assistant, striking the word `hurricane' from the assistant's report for September 21 and leading to a lack of warning to the targeted, highly populated areas. The fact that such a storm was unique or that most of the Atlantic's similar storms pushed to the northeast and out to sea was not a good reason to ignore the disastrous consequences of the "Bermuda high" that kept the storm closer to land. The post-storm analysis may have been the real impetus for the modernization of weather forecasting. repairing the damage to railroads, telephone lines, livestock and roads helped usher in the modern age. Air passenger traffice between New York and Boston increased 500% in the week after the storm. Scotti, a journalist and mystery novelist, uses words well. "Sea" is laden with brief, connected, poignant stories. Capturing the wildness of the sea and storms is no small task. Scotti even includes a brief set of scenes from the life of Katherine Hepburn from that day: swimming and golfing in Connecticut, before seeing her estate, Tara, being washed away. "Sea: has about five small maps; each could have used a bit more detail. And a larger map, tracking the entire storm of its short life, would have been a good, consistent visual reference point for the reader, and would provide more of the dynamic nature of the storm. Without it, some of the stories are static and difficult to connect.
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