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Chargement... The Children's Blizzard (original 2004; édition 2005)par David Laskin (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreThe Children's Blizzard par David Laskin (2004)
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. This is a non-fiction account of the blizzard of 1888, sometimes called the schoolhouse blizzard, because 280-300+ children died. While a good, factual account, there were a few chapters that were just mind-numbing boring to me: 68 pages on meteorology, fronts to be exact, and the description of the villages from whence the immigrants came (Norway-primarily). I would have been more interested in the people themselves, but do understand in a work of NF 80+ years later, hard to do! I found interesting the flag system of weather notification for when the telegraph was down (a good deal of the time!). Also, the actual process of the body breakdown when exposed to extreme temperatures was gruesome. Winds so fierce that it peeled the skin off faces in strips. This event took place on the Great Plains--specific to this book the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Nebraska. Native Americans were not mentioned. Might have to research how they managed. ( ) I read this book just as Winter storm Elliott was blowing through the upper 48 in December 2022 and found numerous points that are still relevant today. In 1888 there was apparently not a very reliable weather forecasting system and since information was "telegraphed" and given to the area via flag signals. The forecasts at the time were under the control of the Army Signal Corps and it seems that they had qualified staffing shortages (does this sound familiar?) and those that gave the indications, not forecasts, had to wait for approval before notifications were sent out. AH, bureaucracy even over 100 years ago they were trying to cover their butts. The blizzard hit the Great Plains suddenly on an unseasonably warm day so that many of the children were unprepared for the abrupt frigid temperatures. Teachers were undecided as to whether to keep the children at a school or send them home in the storm. Those that kept the children had roofs blown off, windows broken, and heating fuel exhausted while those children sent home often became lost in the whiteout and ended up either frozen to death or with severe frostbite. Sometimes I laugh at the schools nowadays that shut down at the mere mention of a few inches of snow in our area but with this story I now see that discretion is the better part of valour. I applaud the effort it took to weave a story of multiple accounts of the devastating impact this blizzard had on the lives of those that experienced it into a full-length book. However, *all* the accounts are of white settlers - apparently, the blizzard sidestepped any and all of the native americans that lived in the region. It would have been nice to learn how the native experience compared...or, at the very least, have a paragraph or two about why native americans weren't included so it doesn't seem like they were omitted on purpose. This well written account of the devastating and deadly storm that overran the Great Plains on January 12, 1888 chronicles the event with painstaking details. The author explains that the Army Signal Corps, following strict regulations, gave indications, not forecasts, of the weather. No National Weather Bureau existed, and no personal forecasts were allowed. He further explains how the frigid Canadian air collided with the warm gulf streams, and together created the massive front that inundated the plains. No warning was given for this sudden storm. Indeed, there was no way to get word to all the outlying farms even if a warning had been issued. The author goes on to explain how the pulverized snow and ice crystals coated clothes and skin and froze on eyelids and made even breathing difficult, if not impossible. Animals froze where they stood and suffocated. But worse by far was the fate of the children. The storm struck as many schools were closing for the day. Caught unawares, some teachers told their student to hurry home as quickly as possible. But many got lost on the way. Other teachers kept students in the the schools, only to have windows blown in, roofs blown off, and fuel exhausted. Because the day had started out warm for January, most of the kids were ill dressed for winter’s worst, without heavy coats, boots, scarfs, and mittens. The author writes about several of the doomed children, of the teacher who got her class to safety, of the people who sheltered as best as they could under hay stacks, and of those who survived the night, only to drop dead the next day. He also writes of the aftermath, of the amputations and the infections that claimed more lives. Reading like a novel but including the well researched details that explains the entirety of the blizzard, this nonfiction book is rich with the history of that time period in the Great Plains. Highly recommended. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
History.
Nature.
Nonfiction.
HTML: "David Laskin deploys historical fact of the finest grain to tell the story of a monstrous blizzard that caught the settlers of the Great Plains utterly by surprise. . . . This is a book best read with a fire roaring in the hearth and a blanket and box of tissues near at hand." Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City "Heartbreaking. . . . This account of the 1888 blizzard reads like a thriller." Entertainment Weekly The gripping true story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newly arrived settlers and cast a shadow on the promise of the American frontier. January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent. By the next morning, some five hundred people lay dead on the drifted prairie, many of them children who had perished on their way home from country schools. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh environment. Recent immigrants from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and the Ukraine learned that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled. With the storm as its dramatic, heartbreaking focal point, The Children's Blizzard captures this pivotal moment in American history by tracing the stories of five families who were forever changed that day. David Laskin has produced a masterful portrait of a tragic crucible in the settlement of the American heartland. The P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more. .Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)977.031History and Geography North America Midwestern U.S.Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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