Eric Jay Dolin
A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes
From the moment European colonists laid violent claim to this land, hurricanes have had a profound and visceral impact on American history—yet, no one has attempted to write the definitive account of America’s entanglement with these meteorological behemoths.
Eric Jay Dolin presents the five-hundred-year story of American hurricanes, from the nameless storms that threatened Columbus’ New World voyages, to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the escalation of hurricane season as a result of global warming.
Weaving a story of shipwrecks and devastated cities, of heroism and folly, Dolin introduces a rich cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Hepburn, and Steven Spielberg. He puts us in the middle of the most devastating storms of the past, none worse than the Galveston hurricane of 1900, which killed at least 6,000 people, the highest toll of any natural disaster in American history.
A necessary work of environmental and cultural history, A Furious Sky will change the way we understand the storms on the horizon of America’s future.
Eric Jay Dolin, PhD, is the author of fourteen books. His most recent is A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes, which received a number of accolades, including being chosen by the Washington Post as one of 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2020, by Kirkus Reviews as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2020 (in addition to being a Kirkus Prize finalist), by the Library Journal and Booklist as one of the Best Science & Technology Books of 2020, and by the New York Times Book Review as an “Editor’s Choice.” Other books include Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, which was chosen as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U.S. Maritime History; and Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates, which was chosen as a “Must-Read” book for 2019 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and was a finalist for the 2019 Julia Ward Howe Award given by the Boston Author’s Club. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his PhD in environmental policy, Dolin lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family.