BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE

The Perfect Storm, A True Story of Men Against the Sea

by Sebastian Junger

W.W. Norton & Company, 227 pp., $14.00 (paper)

Isaac’s Storm, A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

by Erk Larson

Vintage, 323 pp., $13.00 (paper)

Last Man Out, The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster

by Melissa Fay Greene

Harcourt, Inc., 342 pp., $25.00

The Children’s Blizzard

by David Laskin

HarperCollins, 307 pp., $24.95

Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in South Asia, the bombing of the World Trade Center – the events that reveal our human vulnerability have always had the power to rivet our attention. Whether natural or fabricated, life-threatening catastrophes provide opportunities for people to exhibit the stuff of which they are made. This hero-making feature gives rise to the popularity of books about storms, accidents and wars. Curious about how we ourselves would respond, we are eager to hear how others acted under pressure.

Adversity narratives, with their characteristic tragedy and accompanying hero, are as old as storytelling itself. We find this theme in venerable texts from the Bible to the Odyssey, as well as in adventure classics like Jack London’s Call of the Wild and a slew of recent nonfiction recreations. The bookshelves are crammed with tales of disaster, and we can expect more in the wake of Katrina.

Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm is a narrative about the hurricane-force storm that swept the East Coast in October 1991. In Isaac’s Storm, Erik Larson, a writer in love with American history and especially the Gilded Age, describes in minute detail the hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900. In The Children’s Blizzard, David Laskin tackles the story of the snow storm that struck South Dakota and Nebraska on January 12, 1888. Melissa Faye Greene focuses on a humanly created calamity, the Springhill Mine disaster in Nova Scotia on October 23, 1958 in Last Man Out .  Although all these writers have taken the classic Man Against Nature plot, the heroes they find, or in Larson’s case fail to find, are significantly different.

Junger’s The Perfect Storm depicts the northeastern seaboard storm as “perfect” in the sense that it could not possibly have been worse. In this area with its long history of fishing and shipping, storms are so prevalent that sailors, pilots and parachutists are trained to be professional heroes. Thus, Coast Guard and Air National Guard para-rescue jumpers came to the aid of boats pummeled by unexpectedly high waves. In response to an SOS, para-rescue jumpers dropped from helicopters that entered the eye of the storm to help a yacht called Satori. Much of Junger’s book describes the men who went down on the doomed vessel Andrea Gail, but what makes The Perfect Storm an inspiring read is the heroism of the para-rescue jumpers and Karen Stimson, captain of the Satori.

Stimson kept the yacht afloat while the jumpers made multiple attempts to lift the crew off the Satori. In Stimson, Junger found the kind of hero we would all like to be: quick-witted and calm under pressure, skilled and professional at the task at hand, capable but knowing when to ask for help.

In contrast, Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm gives the reader no hero. Larson paints Galveston as a city marked by money and presents the meteorologists who could have given warning of the impending storm -- and thus saved many lives -- as men caught up in the hubris that characterized the Gilded Age. His main character, Isaac Cline, is a scientist whose ambition is more important than his family. Isaac’s Storm leaves the reader with a deep sense of sadness because people of this era, who assumed nature was no obstacle for man, contributed to a disaster of major proportions. At the same time the book generates a respect for the forces of nature to which the human race must adapt.

The Galveston hurricane killed 8000 people. Twelve years earlier, a Midwestern blizzard had also killed 8000 people, many of them children. In The Children’s Blizzard, Laskin focuses attention on the immigrant farmers who flocked to the plains for free land. He is intent on helping the reader understand the desperate conditions that had driven these immigrants from their homes in Germany, Scandinavia and the Ukraine. By the time the balmy weather of January 12, 1888 has morphed into a deadly blizzard, the reader cares deeply about families living in sod huts and sending their children to a one-room schoolhouse.

For Laskin, heroes are just ordinary people: the seventeen-year-old school teacher who tears the girls’ aprons into strips and ties her pupils together so they won’t get lost in blinding snow; the father unable to see any signs of civilization who places his son on the ground and protects him with his own body and that of his dog; the fourteen-year-old boy who goes out in subzero weather to find his younger brother and carry him home. They are the men, women and children who walk on wooden legs because they lost a limb to frostbite. Despite the havoc wrecked by nature, The Children’s Blizzard is inspiring because Laskin found in the response of the prairie farmers evidence of the courage and sacrifice that built America.

Similar to Laskin, in Last Man Out, Melissa Faye Greene finds hope in the most humble of humans: the miners, their families, and the community. But one feels echoes of Larson when she also reveals that the cave-in was humanly engineered. Among all the heroes, Greene paints Maurice Ruddick, an Afro-Canadian and the last man out, most poignantly.

Aided by transcripts of interviews conducted with survivors at the time of their rescue, Greene slows time to the minutes and hours they experienced and shows many faces of heroism: those whose energies kept their group hopeful in the beginning, those who left messages to hoped-for rescuers, those who cheered the efforts of others, those who sought possible exits, those who comforted the wounded, those who called for pounding one more time on the pipe that connected them to the world beyond their trap. And outside in the world of the living, she depicts families standing hour on end at the mine entrance, minors digging handful by handful to find those not yet accounted for, as well as the doctor who went with the rescuers to help those who were found.

Greene goes further. She follows the lives of the survivors after their rescue to reveal the fickleness of time. Human beings are quick to forget their heroes, prone to jealousy, and often self-serving in the crush of daily existence. The miners in Last Man Out possess both the humble heroism of the immigrants in The Children’s Blizzard and the defective humanity of the meteorologists in Isaac’s Storm.   

Laskin and Greene’s common-place heroes, Junger’s professional and resilient heroes and Larson’s self-important losers show us both our potential for heroism and our shortcomings. Because we learn from those whose courage inspires us as well as those whose hubris contributes to disaster, the books yet to be written, --the disaster narratives about Katrina and what went very wrong in New Orleans, about the Asian tsunami, about September 11, about whatever the next disaster that befalls us is -- will need to delve into both sides of the story.

LIDONA WAGNER is a second-year graduate student in the University of Oregon’s literary nonfiction program.