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.
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.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling and thorough writing.
Review: Though not "real life adventure writing" in the same sense as Jon Krakauer or Sebastian Junger, Sudden Sea nevertheless takes the action packed storm of 1938 and constructs a similarly told story of science, adventure, and humanity in the face of powerful natural forces. What made this book even better was the tendency to avoid speculation and to present several sides of the same story to show how terrible and confusing the event was. There is ample attention given to geographic and meteorological detail.
Rating:
Summary: They Didn't Know What Hit 'Em.
Review: Wham! It hit me right between the eyes. I couldn't stop reading until I learned what happened to the kids on that bus. R.A. Scotti's detailed and moving account of physical destruction and human drama is a must-read for any storm watcher. Initially projected to strike the Miami-Palm Beach area, the Category 5 Hurricane veered off course and went nearly unnoticed by the U.S. Weather Bureau's Washington D.C. office. If, according to Scotti's well-documented account, the higher-ups at the U.S. Weather Bureau's Washington D.C. office had listened to one junior forecaster, residents of Long Island, Connecticut and Rhode Island might have been able to brace themselves against the raging sea. Instead, the 2:00 p.m. weather advisory from Washington made no reference to the term "hurricane." A mere half-hour later, residents of Patchogue were blindsided when the Great Hurricane of 1938 slammed into eastern Long Island. Scotti brings to this tale a human element so often missing in other books of this genre. This is, in many ways, a tale of human survival. Much of the book is drawn from personal interviews with survivors and, in that respect, "Sudden Sea" is, in part, a recording of oral history. Scotti's background as a novelist is evident throughout - I could clearly imagine Harriet and Margaret Moore clinging to shards of their rooftop as they floated through shark-infested waters from Napatree, Rhode Island towards Stonington, Connecticut, the children gathered for an end-of-summer party in Westhampton and the school bus mired the the murky waters near Mackerel Cove. In laying out the human drama, Scotti also discusses the conditions that allow such a storm to gain such force, investigates the failure of the U.S. Weather Bureau to issue appropriate weather advisories and questions whether such a storm could have such an impact today. I definitely recommend it!
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