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Informationen zum Autor David Laskin is the author of The Children’s Blizzard , which won the Washington State Book Award and Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award for nonfiction. The author of several other works of nonfiction, Laskin writes for the New York Times and the Washington Post . He and his wife, the parents of three grown daughters, live in Seattle. Klappentext Nowhere in the world is weather as volatile and powerful as it is in North America. Scorching heat in the Southwest! hurricanes on the Atlantic coast! tornadoes in the Plains! blizzards in the mountains: Every area of the country has vastly different weather! and vastly different cultures as a result. Braving the Elements is David Laskin's delightful and fascinating history of how our unique weather has shaped a nation! and how we've tried to cope with it over centuries. Since before Columbus! the peoples of America have struggled to make sense of the capricious and violent nature of America's weather. Anasazi Indians used the rain dance (and sometimes human sacrifice) to induce rain! while the Puritans in New England blamed the sins of the community for lightening strikes and Nor'easters. IN modern times we carry on those traditions by blaming the weatherman for ruined weekends. Despite hi-tech satellites and powerful computers and 24-hour-a-day forecasting from The Weather Channel! we're still at the mercy of the whims of Mother Nature. Laskin recounts the many dramatic moments in American weather history! from the "Little Ice Age" to Ben Franklin's invention of the lightning rod to the Great Blizzard of the 1930's to the worries about global warming. Packed with fresh insights and wonderful lore and trivia! Braving the Elements is unique and essential reading for anyone who's ever asked! "What's it like outside?" Every forecaster who works for the National Weather Service has a story about when he or she got the call. It almost always happened in childhood, usually between the ages of seven and ten. A tornado veered off just before it totaled their home. Lightning hit a tree across the street and they wanted to know why. Their dad got stranded by a hurricane. "The next day I knew I wanted to be a weatherman," one forecaster told me after recounting his tale of how a tornado whipped up I "just scared the devil out of me" when he was a ten-year-old boy in Texas. "And I never changed my mind from that time on." When you spend time around National Weather Service meteorologists, you hear a lot versions of this story, but the conclusion is always the same: I never changed my mind from that day on. Lifelong commitment, insatiable curiosity, inexhaustible excitement over the weather: these are passions that motivate the people in charge of our national weather. These folks are not dull gray bureaucrats marking time in cinder-block Washington offices. They are people who have been obsessed for as long as they can remember with the weather--what causes it to change, how to predict those changes, how to communicate the predictions to as many people as quickly as possible. "We are all weather nuts," confessed one NWS meteorologist with some pride. Even when we're off duty, we're very conscious of what's going on in the weather. We're always aware of what's going on out there." Spend some more time around the NWS folks, really get them talking about what they do and why they do it for the government instead of for some television station or private weather company, and you learn that underneath the weather obsession is a real sense of mission. For them, the bottom line is us--our lives, our property, our safety. "I don't care if I get an attribution or not on the Weather Channel," says Ed Gross, the NWS chief of industrial meteorology (which means the liaison between the NWS and commercial weather operations such as Accu-Weather or the Weather Channel). "If they say 72...
