Superstorm

October 1, 2014
The strange and devastating life of Hurricane Sandy receives a fine, grim telling from Miles (English/Chatham Univ.; All Standing: The Remarkable Story of the Jeanie Johnston, The Legendary Irish Famine Ship, 2013, etc.). Sandy was a freak storm, a shape-shifter that meteorologists just couldn't quite put a finger on, and for that reason-her crazed and capricious behavior-it made them extremely uneasy. Miles gets the ominous, charged atmosphere right from the start. She picks out a few characters to follow through the storm-hurricane forecasters, the crew of a tall ship, the brave, crazy members of the search-and-rescue teams, the flyers in the weather-reconnaissance squads-and draws them carefully, putting readers in their shoes. She follows the storm day by day, pure energy growing into a system of organized movement, building, gathering wind and water, then unleashing her cargo with a rare full hit on Jamaica, followed by Haiti and Cuba. The level of suffering on these islands was catastrophic, and Miles maintains a small distance between their grief and the page, a bone-cracking misery that follows in the wake of a natural disaster. She provides short biographies of various hurricanes from the past, as well as a history of meteorology and its practices and the graveyard humor of the search-and-rescue teams. The author also tries to get into the head of the tall-ship captain, who pitted a gut decision against better judgment. Eventually, Sandy reached and obliterated the New Jersey shore and hammered New York City with 30-foot waves in the harbor and a colossal storm surge. Not just a chronicle of the storm's terrible progression, this book is also a cautionary tale; as Miles notes, more than 70 percent of mandatory-evacuation residents made the poor decision to stay at home. A rogue storm dazzlingly caught in all its unprecedented bizarreness.

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Starred review from November 1, 2014

This fascinating history of the days before and during Hurricane Sandy offers harrowing personal histories and an incidental meteorological crash course and disaster how-to. The research that went into the book must have been a staggering effort, as Miles (writer in residence, Green Mountain Coll., writing, Chatham Univ.; All Standing; Adventures with Ari) offers meticulous detail on the experiences of many players from different walks of life and varying levels of storm experience and responsibility for others. At times the book is heartbreaking, too, with the author describing, for example, the evacuation of 20 infants "cocooned in blankets" from an New York University hospital, the last moments of sailors who simply disappeared, and a mother's frantic, fruitless effort to save her children, who were washed away. Also crushing is to learn how politics and even language choice hampered efforts to convince the public that evacuation was necessary. Many lessons are to be learned from the storm, not least of which is that safety can be more important than accuracy. VERDICT Miles's account--this year's Five Days at Memorial--is an important record for future planners and a gripping read.--Henrietta Verma, Libray Journal

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