Roar of the Heavens
List Price: $14.95 Our Price: $11.21 You Save: $3.74 (25%) Availability: | Usually ships in 24 hours (as of 1:02 AM CT - detail) |
Product Description
"Rain is likely tonight, ending tomorrow. Thursday will be fair and cooler." So began the final and most destructive act of Hurricane Camille, a storm so ferocious that scientists calculated the odds as once in a thousand years. In 1969, meteorologists were yet to have satellite and computer technology at their disposal, and the National Hurricane Center’s director, Dr. Robert Simpson, could only rely on his instincts to predict Camille’s track. The Category Five storm, with wind gusts over 200 miles per hour, tore into the Mississippi/Alabama coast, erasing entire towns. At a hurricane party on a rooftop a few miles from where Camille made landfall, the nearly three-story tidal storm surge—the highest ever measured—collapsed the entire building and swept 23 people to their deaths. Incredibly, the worst was yet to come. As Camille hit the mountains of western Virginia she also collided with two other weather systems that squeezed millions of tons of water out of the storm like a sponge. It didn’t just rain; the air held nearly the maximum amount of water theoretically possible, becoming a solid body of descending liquid, and lightning flashed sideways. Eight hours and more than two feet of rain later, 124 people in rural Nelson County were dead. Many of them, taken by the devastating floods, would never be found. Roar of the Heavens tells Camille’s destructive hour-by-hour story through the riveting first-person accounts of survivors and key players, including Dr. Simpson, who would later help to pioneer the universal Saffir-Simpson Scale for hurricanes; Mary Ann Gerlach, the lone survivor of that hurricane party, who was later found clinging to a tree five miles away; and William Whitehead, the very untraditional sheriff of Nelson County, who became a central figure in the storm’s aftermath. At the height of school desegregation, blacks and whites came together to rebuild, and students worked together with locals who had so recently attacked them for demonstrating against the Vietnam War. Camille’s ferocity exposed the inadequacies of the nation’s ability to deal with such a cataclysmic event and led directly to the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Yet Roar of the Heavens is also a cautionary tale, as the United States is still terribly unprepared to deal with hurricanes. When Katrina came ashore as a Category Four hurricane in 2005, over 1,000 lives were tragically lost, and experts agree that it is only a question of time before another Category Five storm hits the U.S. mainland.
Spotlight Customer Reviews:
Summary:
The Beast That Was Camille
|
Comment:
Hurricane Camille was a beast of mythic proportions and she is still one of those extraordinary events that are engrained in the memory of all Southerners who are old enough to remember her rampage. In this book Stefan Bechtel has given us a riveting account of that once in a thousand years storm and he has done so with the voice of a great storyteller so that instead of a dry historical account of the facts he has delivered a vehicle that transports his readers into the heart of the storm where they feel as if they are right there witnessing those tragic events for themselves.
The famous or infamous hurricane party at the Richelieu apartments seems to have caused some controversy among those who have reviewed this book before me and while Bechtel does very little to dispel the myth he doesn't do anything to perpetuate it either. He does mention that Mary Ann Gerlach had planned a party but he also tells us that she took a nap and only woke up once it was almost to late to escape. The Richelieu apartments actually play only a minor part in this narrative and having read other books about this tragedy it was very refreshing to find a book that paid less attention to that one apartment building and more to the many other stories of survival and tragedy that occurred along the Gulf Coast. For a very full treatment of what was happening at the Richelieu apartments I would recommend Ernest Zebrowski and Judith Howard's "Category 5."
Many of the interviews that this author conducted were with people who's story has been told before but he also did interviews with and told the stories of many people who's story I had never come across before. Even when the stories were stories that I had heard before Bechtel told them in such a fascinating way that I still found them to be extremely gripping and moving. This author manages to convey the tragic loss that so many families suffered on both the coast and in Virginia in such a moving way that I would recommend that you keep a hanky handy just in case.
Camille and hurricanes in general have always fascinated me and this is one of the best books that I have come across on the subject. Bechtel tells his story with the deftness and skill of a David McCullough and although he did leave a strand or two up in the air he has given us a masterful narrative that not only entertains and informs but also manages to explain the meteorological events that caused the tragedy in Nelson County Virginia in a way that even I could understand.
|
Summary:
Author perpetuates the myth of the "Hurricane Party"
|
Comment:
The book rambles on. I suppose it's good reading at times, but as far as being well researched (as so many gush about here), it isn't well researched at all. There was no "hurricane party" at the Richelieu Apartments on the night of Camille's landfall. That is a complete myth, but one that will not die--the national media is apparently not interested in the facts; ditto for this author. Mary Ann Gerlach (who, btw, was convicted of killing her 11th!!! husband in 1979, but paroled in the early '90s) was not the only survivor of those 23 who stayed on at the Richelieu that night. Two other Richelieu survivors--Ben Duckworth and Mike Gannon--have tried to set the record straight for years, but the myth stays alive, and people eat it up like catfish. The fact is that only eight of the Richelieu 23 died. Gannon and Duckworth (and a few more) were staying in the apartment of an elderly couple, Zoe and Jack Matthews, to help take care of them during the storm. Mrs Matthews had recently had hip surgery. Another couple, Rick and Luane Keller, were also in the group. Luane perished, but Rick survived. Gerlach's husband Fritz (husband #6), also perished.
|
Summary:
A storytelling event of the first order
|
Comment:
review posted in the American Geographical Society newsletter, "Ubique":
The past as prologue: The story of Hurricane Camille, which until recently defined the apex of tropical energy and fearsomeness, as told by Stefan Bechtel in ROAR OF THE HEAVENS.
During the summer of 1969, nature opened her Pandora's box and released Camille. She perhaps took her first steps as a tropical wave of energy out of the Ethiopian Highlands, made a lazy parabolic arc through the southern Atlantic, then hit the cauldron of warm sea air in the Caribbean.
Bechtel follows nimbly on her heels and issues moment-by-moment reports. He provides a skilful, basic understanding of hurricane science -- readers walk away with a firm grasp of orographic effects, the nature of the tropopause and the fluid mechanics of storm surges -- as well as a "disaster culture" that spurs people to take the storm head on, a culture of cataclysmic ignorance.
What drives that point home is the vivid reconstruction of what it was like to be in the storm, fashioned out of interviews with a few principle actors and dozens of bit players. The storm made landfall to the east of New Orleans with winds that at times approached 200 mph and carrying a storm surge three stories in height. Survivors talk of darkness and howling, being raked by flying glass, having their clothes stripped off. Entire communities were obliterated, while farther to the north, the Woodstock Music Festival was being pelted by rain from all the atmospheric disturbance.
Bechtel relates how then the storm started to disintegrate as it moved up the Mississippi Valley, falling off the radar, only to gather itself once more, dropping biblical rains -- perhaps thirty inches in a nightlong deluge -- on a confined area in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. Once again, Bechtel's storytelling power takes on a terrifying clarity. Scores would die as towns were scoured clean away, the rain so heavy it was nearly impossible to simply breathe. A mountainside sloughed off, writes Bechtel, leaving the eerie "smell of deep time."
Camille was a meterological event of the first order. So is Bechtel's recreation.
|
Summary:
Totally absorbing
|
Comment:
I was on my way to a Poetry Festival on a Friday, and
I started reading Roar of the Heavens Thursday night.
Instead of getting rested for the Festival, I was up
until 1:30 am, When I arrived, and pitched my tent, and
got to the Festival grounds, I immediately sat down and
started reading the book. Instead of strolling the village,
breaking into a discussion on Craft with a Poet, I sat
down and kept reading. Friday night was freezing cold,
and I kept reading. In the cold, I kept thinking about
the fascinating dynamics of the structure of a Hurricane,
and Warren Raines freezing as he clung to tree branches.
On Saturday, during a readings break, I climbed into my
car, and finished the book. Finally, I could stop thinking
about what happened to Mary Anne, Buzz, etc, and etc, and
starting absorbing some POETRY. Saturday night it was
raining, and I was terrified driving to the campground,
and hearing the rain on the roof of my tent, and it was
pouring Sunday morning, and I wondered if having been
isolated from Weather forecasts, something was coming of
which I was unaware. And thought of the unidentified bodies
perhaps hiking the trails as Camille roared through.
What a riveting read, and the adrenaline is still pumping!
The scientific explanation of the mechanics of a Hurricane
were so clearly described, and fascinating. And the interweaving
of what was happening in the country and world, with
the life and death dramas of those trying to survive
Camille really put things in time and place that connects
the reader intimately to the events. And the families and people
were so real; their pain and suffering, and the incredible
devastation. I know I was thinking about going to college
that summer, at that's all I remember. I remember going
to Mardi Gras in 1972 and seeing the steps going to no where
on the Coast, Biloxi. And I used to drive Rt. 29 going to
Conn. from N.C. in the seventies. Congratulations on writing
such an intense and absorbing, and well researched book.
|
Summary:
A great book about a great disaster
|
Comment:
I remember some of the media coverage about Camille but Bechtel takes the reader inside the storm for a thrilling, if harrowing, ride. I confess I was ignorant of the damage in Virginia and I certainly did not put Woodstock and Camille together before reading this book. For disaster junkies like me, this is a MUST for your top shelf. For anyone interested in those reacting to a disaster, this book introduces you to some unforgettable people. And, for anyone living on the Gulf Coast, it should be required reading. Every week.
|
|