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Summary
Summary
From the National Book Award finalist Lauren Redniss, author of Radioactive, comes a dazzling fusion of storytelling, visual art, and reportage that grapples with weather in all its dimensions: its danger and its beauty, why it happens and what it means.
WINNER OF THE PEN/E. O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, KIRKUS REVIEWS, AND SHELF AWARENESS
Weather is the very air we breathe--it shapes our daily lives and alters the course of history. In Thunder & Lightning, Lauren Redniss tells the story of weather and humankind through the ages.
This wide-ranging work roams from the driest desert on earth to a frigid island in the Arctic, from the Biblical flood to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Redniss visits the headquarters of the National Weather Service, recounts top-secret rainmaking operations during the Vietnam War, and examines the economic impact of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Drawing on extensive research and countless interviews, she examines our own day and age, from our most personal decisions-- Do I need an umbrella today? --to the awesome challenges we face with global climate change.
Redniss produced each element of Thunder & Lightning : the text, the artwork, the covers, and every page in between. She created many of the images using the antiquated printmaking technique copper plate photogravure etching. She even designed the book's typeface.
The result is a book unlike any other: a spellbinding combination of storytelling, art, and science.
Praise for Thunder & Lightning
"[An] aesthetically charged and deeply researched account . . . a wild rainstorm of a book, pelting the reader with ideas and inspiration." -- Nature
"A gorgeous and illuminating illustrated study of weather in all its tempestuous variety . . . Redniss's combo of fact, folklore, and vibrant etched copperplate prints enthralls." -- O: The Oprah Magazine
"Eerily beautiful . . . Contains plenty of scientific explanation (including more than a few nods toward global warming), but also far-flung personal stories that illuminate the beauty, wonder and chaos inherent in the elements." -- The New York Times
"Magical . . . Redniss has . . . shown us how human beings live with nature--fighting, coexisting, taming, predicting via leech barometer and radar and intuition." -- The New York Times Book Review
"[A] twenty-first-century genius . . . Redniss is inventing a new literary genre. . . . The reader willing to put herself fully in Redniss's hands will be rewarded with a delicious feeling of being enveloped by a phenomenon that eclipses the chiming trivialities of daily life." -- Elle
"Lends a graphic-novel-like allure to some of nature's most curious paradoxes." -- Vogue
"Redniss is one of the most creative science writers of our time--her combination of beautiful artwork, reporting, and poetic prose brings science to life in ways that words alone simply cannot." --Rebecca Skloot
"Redniss combines her own dual punch of expressive art and impressive erudition to give an entirely new take on all that happens above our heads. This is an illuminated book that is also an illuminating one." --Adam Gopnik
"A strange and wonderful thing, the work of a first-class mind that refuses to submit to any categories or precedent." --Dave Eggers
"Beautiful and totally original." --Elizabeth Kolbert
Author Notes
Lauren Redniss is the author of several works of visual non-fiction and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." Her book Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future won the 2016 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, and Artist-in-Residence at the American Museum of Natural History. She teaches at the Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
Redniss (Radioactive: Marie Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout, 2010) delivers an arrestingly unconventional exploration of weather. This is a terrific celebration of weather as an elemental force in not only our daily lives, but in our global stories, myths, history, and cultural identities. It is part powerful graphic novel (with impeccable color sense) and part meteorological text. The author divides the book into chapters such as Cold, Rain, Sky, Heat, Dominion, Profit, and Forecasting, and within each chapter is an array of anecdotes and factoids, vest-pocket biographies, and elegant place descriptions. After an introduction to the Arctic explorer Vilhjlmur Stefnsson, Redniss discusses the demographics of the far-north Svalbard archipelago ("Today, Svalbard has a population of approximately 2000 people and 3000 polar bears"). Then she moves on to a lightshow in South America's Atacama Desert: "in the shifting light, the Atacama's sands turn gold, orange, and violet. In the shadows, the landscape is blue, green, violet. Treeless, plantless expanses of stark grandeur roll out like a Martian landscape." Redniss details what we know about the dynamics of lightning and why lightning often gives us the shivers. "Lightning can charge out of a bright blue sky," she writes, "traveling horizontally 10 or more miles from a nearby storm. Lightning can, and does, strike twice." The author also looks at the meteorological effects of the death of Kim Jong II as reported by North Korea's official news outlets ("winds were stronger, waves higher, and temperatures the coldest of the season"), the money to be made off ice at Walden Pond, and Benjamin Franklin, who "was a proponent of air baths, the practice of sitting naked by an open window." This book is not simply a collection of oddments and odd fellows, but rather a genuine demonstration of weather as a phenomena and how it is fantastical on both the symbolic and systematized levels. A highly atmospheric, entertainingly earnest, and intimate engrossment with the world's most popular topic of conversation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE. A Graphic Memoir: A Childhood in the Middle East (1978-1984), by Riad Sattouf. Translated by Sam Taylor. (Metropolitan/Holt; paper, $26.) With fluent prose and precise drawing, a cartoonist depicts his father's flaws. NOT ON FIRE, BUT BURNING, by Greg Hrbek. (Melville House, $25.95.) This impressive novel explores the aftermath of an imagined "8/11," which evokes people's best and worst selves. THE SONG MACHINE: Inside the Hit Factory, by John Seabrook. (Norton, $26.95.) A New Yorker writer looks at producers, executives, songwriters and artists in the troubled music business. HERE, by Richard McGuire. (Pantheon, $35.) A corner of the living room of the author's childhood home in New Jersey is viewed over a period of eons in this graphic novel, which introduces a third dimension to the flat page. THUNDER AND LIGHTNING: Weather Past, Present, Future, by Lauren Redniss. (Random House, $35.) How human beings live with nature, combining information with striking illustration. SUPERFORECASTING: The Art and Science of Prediction, by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner. (Crown, $28.) To become a superforecaster, rely on data and logic and eliminate personal bias. STEP ASIDE, POPS: A Hark! A Vagrant Collection, by Kate Beaton. (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95.) Recent strips from Beaton's audacious online comic, collected here, cover a wide range of topics. THE SEARCHER, by Simon Toyne. (Morrow/ HarperCollins, $26.99.) This novel about a man with amnesia grabs our attention and keeps it. THE KILLING KIND, by Chris Holm. (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26.) A fast-moving, well-constructed thriller about an assassin who kills assassins. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books.