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Chargement... Storm (original 1941; édition 1941)par George Stewart
Information sur l'oeuvreStorm par George R. Stewart (1941)
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Outstanding. A description of the birth of a storm and then its progress over 12 days. A wide variety of situations and people are involved. Each are introduced early in the book, but in many cases their significance does not become clear until later. Stewart is a master of describing a chain of events - two boys who shoot an electrical box on a pole which later lets the rain in and shorts the circuitry, disabling pumps and flooding an underpass. Or a tree that fell many years before and eventually slides off a rocky edge and brings down a phone line, disrupting a call. Or an owl that gets electrocuted on a power line, causing a weakness in the cable that later fails under the weight of ice from the storm. As others have noted, descriptions of life in California in 1941 are fascinating, including the human skill that was involved in interpreting weather charts and producing a forecast. Follows a Pacific storm from it's inception off the coast of Japan to a several day wallop of California. Set in the present day of 1941, we follow the impact of the storm from the Weather Service to the railroad, air service, US 40 over Donner Pass, and Army Corps of Engineers Sacramento office. There is a wayward owl and lineman, blown down tree, and lineman as well. Really happy to stumble across. 12 days. A storm arises, crosses the Pacific, hits California ending a drought. The people who watch it and are responsible for dealing with its consequences in the Weather Bureau, highways, power, telephone, railroad, water management and air control are followed as well, but while the storm is named, Maria, only a few of the people are, and those whose inner workings are described as well as most others are referred to by job title often just initials. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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"A violent storm sweeps through California, taking on a life of her own. Making her way from the Pacific Coast, she gains momentum as she approaches the Sierra and transforms into a blizzard of great strength, covering mountain ranges and roads with twenty feet of snow. Originally published in 1941, Storm is a rare combination of fiction and science by a master storyteller, drawing upon a deep knowledge of geography, meteorology, and human nature"-- Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Those human characters are, by traditional literary standards, given only slightly more development. They have character traits and motivations, both limited in number and very sparely drawn, but not personalities. Over the course of the story, we see them almost exclusively in the context of doing their jobs, and learn virtually nothing about their larger lives or inner thoughts and emotions.
All of this serves the central theme of Stewart's novel, which is the collision of natural systems (the storm) and the human systems that it touches: the weather bureau, the airlines and railroads, the power and telephone companies, the flood-control works that regulate the flow of the rivers, and the highway department charged with keeping the mountain roads over the Sierra Nevada open and passable. The drama in the story lies in the humans who operate these systems straining their minds, bodies, and spirits to the breaking point to keep them operating in spite of the storm . . . or at least to keep its disruption of them, and thus its effect on people's lives, to an absolute minimum.
Stewart's writing about atmospheric phenomena, though it occasionally tips into the self-consciously grandiose, remains surprisingly gripping, and his juggling of multiple plot lines and sets of characters is masterful. It's a thoughtful reflection on the way that fragility and resilience coexist in the technological systems that make modern life possible. It's also a look into the minds of the workers whose unseen labor (both physical and mental) keeps those systems operating.
[Storm] not an easy sell to someone you don't know well, but if anything I wrote above intrigues you, it's well worth tracking down. ( )