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    The Children's Blizzard
    The Children's Blizzard
    The Children's Blizzard
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Children's Blizzard

    Written by David Laskin

    Narrated by Paul Woodson

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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 Friday morning, January 13, 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 10, 2016
    ISBN9781515976943
    Author

    David Laskin

    David Laskin is the author of The Children's Blizzard, winner of the Midwest Booksellers' Choice Award for nonfiction and the Washington State Book Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Smithsonian magazine. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

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    Reviews for The Children's Blizzard

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    • 4/5
      Seattle author David Laskin takes a single blizzard, one that occurred January 12, 1888, and creates an entire narrative of the North European immigration to the Great Plains and the hardships they endured there. He follows families of Norwegians and Schweitzer Germans to America, writes of their attempts to bend the land to their will, and the blizzard that emphasizes how futile that attempt could be. He even follows the life and career of the weather forecaster stationed in Saint Paul and his role in the events that unfolded. The book is a primer on meteorology, a collective biography, and a history of the Midwest as reflected in a single natural disaster. It is a fine example of narrative nonfiction, and I especially appreciated his extensive notes on sources. Recommended.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I’ve always thought I would have been a terrible pioneer. I’m not physically tough. I’m highly myopic – without glasses, I can’t find my glasses. I love air conditioning, hot showers and cozy fires. The Children’s Blizzard tells in agonizing detail about the lives of the hardy immigrants who settled in what was then The Northwest. Life was tough enough before the storm hit. But when a “January thaw” day appeared, only to be ended suddenly by a severe and massive blizzard, the results were heartbreaking. The Children’s Blizzard is a tragic story, no doubt, but one that’s well worth reading. The Children’s Blizzard occurred January 12, 1888 in the Dakota Territory, Minnesota, Nebraska and Iowa. Although the definitive number of victims that succumbed to the storm has never been tallied, estimates are between 200 and 500, many of them schoolchildren on their way home. And the blizzard made world-wide heroes and heroines of schoolteachers who saved the lives of their young charges.The author does a masterful job of laying the groundwork – telling the stories of individual immigrant families based on their journals, and detailing the politics and personalities of the weather-forecasting system then in place. He also includes a short chapter and subsequent sections on the science of storms. This book will appeal to anyone who likes history, especially genealogists and family historians. It’s about as close as we can get to time-travel. If all history were written by David Laskin, everyone would LOVE history.
    • 4/5
      A horrible day for those living on the prairies of the United States. The day though it started out warm, became a tragedy when a blizzard hit while the children of those states were walking home from school. If it hadn't been for the bravery of some of the teachers in those one-room schoolhouses, teachers who were as young as 16, many more children would have died. I first heard about this blizzard on a television show, I then read a fictionalized toned down story in a children's book series, both things really interested me so I had to know more about what really happened. While it is very sad in places it was a good read about a part of the settling of the Western USA that isn't much discussed. This does not take place during the winter written about in the Little House book since I have been asked that question.
    • 4/5
      Interesting retelling of The Bizzard of ‘88 in the prairie states. You certainly got a sense of how devastating and heart-wrenching it was for so many settlers’ and their families. A good explanation of how our weather services began.
    • 4/5
      An informative historical account of why our country is still sparsely populated on the Great Plains.
    • 5/5
      The narrator was outstanding! Excellent account of this American tragedy.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      I picked this one up for my nonfiction Nebraska read and whoa it is one harrowing tale! I’ve read about the pioneers’ bitter winters in books like Laura Ingalls Wilder‘s series, but the details shared in this one are shocking. A blizzard hits the US hard in Jan. 1888 and hundreds of people freeze to death when they are trapped in the storm. The writing is very similar to Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm and those who love the detailed weather forecasts will not be disappointed. The loss of life is heartbreaking, as is each family’s story. Highly recommended for those who love historic nonfiction.
    • 5/5
      On January 12, 1888, a massive blizzard swept down without on the north-western United States. Totally unforeseen by primitive techniques and unwary weather observers, the blizzard hit in the middle of a warm pleasant day, where farmers were out working their fields and their stock, children were in school and people were out and about. This ensured a tragedy of massive proportions as people were caught suddenly with warning and without shelter. At least 235 people died, many of them children sent home by teachers who did not appreciate the danger, hence the name Schoolchildren's Blizzard, many froze to death vainly seeking shelter in unheated houses, sheds and haystacks. This is a graphically horriffic book, as the author describes in detail the many stages that a person dying of cold goes through, but a gripping story about an event I had never heard of before.
    • 2/5
      I had never heard of the Children's Blizzard of 1888 before picking up this book. In parts of Nebraska and the Dakota Territory, the storm arrived without notice at midday after a beautiful winter morning. It held some of the worst blizzard conditions and some of the lowest temperatures ever recorded in the Great Plains and it claimed the lives of many children struggling to find their way home from school.

      I was disappointed in this book. There is a lot of background information (chapters of it), then the storm comes (in one chapter), then there is a somewhat quick wrap-up in the final chapters. The author follows several families impacted by the storm, but the stories are so chopped up, and interspersed with so much extraneous detail, that you begin to lose track of who is who. All together too much background, too many stories for this to really connect.
    • 5/5
      This is a very, very good book and one that I will re-read at some point to re-capture the details that escaped on the first go round. And it was also delightful to read a weather geek explain the phenomenon that caused this catastrophic blizzard: high pressure, low pressure, and how they work. Maybe someday I'll understand that aspect!Laskin does a phenomenal job researching the lives of the families caught up in this push into the Western US plains. He researches the history and places where 5 or 6 families originated, their customs, reasons for making the voyage, experiences to get to their ports, and other similar stories from the time. So we get to know some families, know that they had stories similar to other people from the same region or on the same transport, and they were not plucked up and placed in the Dakotas or Nebraska out of thin air.There is a great deal of research into early American weather forecasting, especially what worked and what didn't. And the Signal Corps and Lieutenant Woodruff, who was an active duty soldier in charge of the weather forecasting and relaying messages East from the various points in Montana and the Great Plains, interpreting them, and drawing them on a map ready for the telegraph machines.When the storm hits, Laskin again goes into detail about the snow and ice and crystals, as well as what extreme cold does to the human body based on survivors' stories and medical evidence. It is also important to know, and I didn't, that there were survivors who lasted the night, only to die the next morning when the blood from their freezing limbs began to circulate around their hearts. So it's a heart-wrenching historical account, very similar to "Isaac's Storm" and tales about the Northwest Passage, of people who left one land and set of difficult circumstances for hope of a better life, only to have that life changed so tragically.
    • 4/5
      An incredibly scientific look at a horrible event in the history of the plains states. Laskin takes great pains to explain the meteorology, the physiology and the human toll of this storm. It was difficult to read what happens when hypothermia occurs and in such detail, but it is necessary to the story. Your heart breaks reading the individual stories of the pioneers and their children.
    • 4/5
      Audiobook read by Paul WoodsonOn January 12, 1888 a massive cold front brought plummeting temperatures, gale-force winds, and blinding snow to the northern plains. The day had started out unseasonably mild, and children walked to school without their usual heavy coats, gloves and hats. Caught completely unawares and unprepared many of them died in the blizzard that is still talked about in the Dakotas, Nebraska and Minnesota. Laskin has pieced together the stories of several immigrant families and what happened to them during the two days of the storm. There are stories of heroism and determination. Children who kept their heads and found shelter. Teachers who shepherded their classes to safety. Men and women who died searching for their livestock. Many who survived the initial storm and exposure, later died of complications – gangrene that resulted from severe frostbite, or heart arrhythmias that caught them unawares. It’s a gripping tale, told masterfully. Paul Woodson does a fine job reading the audiobook. He sets a good pace and his narration held my attention throughout.
    • 4/5
      On January 12, 1888, a snowstorm from hell swept across America's Great Plains. Temperatures rapidly dropped to levels that sound more fitting for Antarctica, and blowing snow crystals reduced the visibility to zero, making it nearly impossible to find one's way to shelter. Hundreds of people died. A distressing number of them were children, since the storm hit while schools were in session, and many of the kids, with or without their teachers, ventured out into the storm in an attempt to get home from school, or at least to reach someplace better stocked with firewood.I have to say, my primary reactions to this history of what was to be called "The Schoolchildren's Blizzard" seems to consist largely of "This is interesting, but..." The account of the storm itself actually takes up less of the book than one might expect. First, it's preceded by some background on the settlement of the American prairies and the history of various immigrant families who were caught in the blizzard, including the motivations that drove them to leave their former homes and the hardships they faced on the journey and afterward. This is interesting, but it bounces back and forth between the tales of the various families so much that I found it a little difficult to keep track of everyone.Then it goes on to explain in great detail how the storm formed, what the state of whether forecasting was at the time, whose job it was to predict this sort of thing, and why there wasn't more warning. This is interesting, but contains perhaps more information about the internal politics of 19th century weather forecasting than I ever actually wanted to know.The chapters that do cover the events of the storm are rather gripping, with harrowing accounts of what people experienced and some very detailed and vivid descriptions of exactly what happens to the human body as it succumbs to hypothermia. This is interesting -- very much so -- but, well, it turns out that reading about children freezing to death is just really not a good time. (I know, who would have thought?)All of this has, however, left me with one very useful realization: I never, ever, ever want to live someplace like South Dakota. I mean, I kind of already knew that, but now I'm really sure. It's not even so much due to hearing about the horrors of the blizzard, as about how the just-slightly-below-freezing temperatures that preceded it kept being described as "warm," or even "balmy." If you ask me, anywhere that's considered warm is just not fit for human habitation.
    • 4/5
      A very thorough accounting of the blizzard of 1888, known as the Children's Blizzard. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of background that is covered in this book. It covers not only the people and the storm itself, but also the history of how they came to the U.S. and settled in the area, and the geography and the meteorology of this time and place in the country.

      Mr. Laskin begins with a look at the settlement of western Minnesota, the Dakotas and Nebraska. We get to know some of the families who immigrated to the U.S., how and why they came. Why they choose the prairie to settle, and the hardships they endured coming and settling here. Then the book switches over to a bit of history of the Weather Bureau, how it worked (or didn't), and how the politics of the day impacted their work.

      The author discusses the weather patterns over that part of the country, and then goes into quite a lot of detail about the storm itself. This is especially enlightening in demonstrating how this particular winter storm was so much worse than any other. This was not just an ordinary blizzard.

      Of course we get the stories of individuals who both survived the storm, and those who did not. I was particularly surprised at how many managed to survive the storm, only to succumb in it's aftermath. I think most of us (at least myself), think that if you manage to survive until the weather is clear, you'll be all right. That is not the case.
    • 4/5
      It's obvious that the author is a meteorological nerd and it overwhelms the book. The anecdotal tales are the highlight, and revealing this horrible incident is a justification for writing it. I also enjoyed the back stories of the Norwegian immigrants, in these fraught anti-immigrant days of the worst president ever. But all the arcane weather data prevented my absorption in the narrative.
    • 3/5
      From the disaster response reading program. A generic disaster book – capsule biographies of the doomed; capsule biographies of whoever the author has decided are to blame for the disaster; some scientific/technical background; ominous warning signs that everybody ignores; disaster; heroism; death; follow-up on the survivors.
      In this case, the disaster is The Children’s Blizzard of 1888; the doomed are an assortment of Norwegian/Ukrainian immigrants to the Dakotas; the guilty parties are the railroads/steamship companies that seduced innocent European farmers into coming to a North American deathtrap and the United States Signal Corps (in charge of weather prediction at the time); the technical background includes explanations of weather systems and medical details of exactly what happens as you die of hypothermia; the warning signs were an ominous cloud on the horizon for the immigrants and supposedly tell-tale drops in barometric pressure for the Weather Service; the disaster is the sudden onset of a blizzard accompanied by a massive temperature drop; heroism includes various people that wandered out in the blizzard looking for husbands/wives/children/etc.; death involves about 250 people; follow-up on the survivors includes the authors visit to various now-abandoned homesites and cemeteries.
      Well enough for this sort of thing. There’s always something to learn; I had no idea the Weather Service was as sophisticated as it was in 1888. Observations were gathered from all over the US and Canada, charted, and “indications” (the word “prediction” was forbidden) telegraphed all over the country. The Service did, in fact, predict a “cold wave” but the warning arrived too late – at least according to author David Laskin. Laskin doesn’t speculate on how a more timely warning could have been communicated to Dakota farmers miles from the nearest town, but instead criticizes the Weather Service’s focus on warning railroads and fruit growers of impending weather. Laskin produces an original weather chart from the day; however, his explanation of cyclones, anticyclones, air masses and so on cries out for a few diagrams rather than paragraphs of text, no matter how clear.
      The heroism is sometimes truly heroic and sometimes a little dubious. The reason the storm was called “The Children’s Blizzard” is so many schoolchildren were killed. The day started with the first warm spell in weeks; many schoolchildren forsook their usually heavy coats and mittens. The storm hit just as school was letting out. Many school teachers were cited as “heroines” because they led their charges to nearby houses – with varying degrees of success. The prudent thing to do, of course, would have been to keep them in the school house; some did exactly that with no ill effects but only get a casual mention. In at least one case, a teacher locked the doors to keep her charges inside, only to have a couple of the burlier farm boys overpower her, break the door down, and escape. And die. The urge to follow a pattern – when school’s done, you go home – overpowered obedience to authority and common sense, a recurring theme in disasters. Laskin follows one little boy, Walter Allen, who had a favorite item in his desk – a pretty perfume bottle he kept in his desk, full of water, to wipe off his slate. Farmers showed up at the school with heavy drays to evacuate the children. Walter boarded a dray with everybody else only to jump off and run back to school and retrieve his bottle, fearing it would break when frozen. It only took a few seconds but the dray was already out of site when he got out again – visibility was less than a yard. Then Walter decided to walk home rather than return to the school house. (He survived; his brother realized he was missing, went back to look for him, and stumbled over his unconscious body, and barely managed to get the pair of them back to town. The perfume bottle froze anyway.)
      Laskin’s discussion of the mechanics of hypothermia death discloses something else I didn’t know before – rewarming shock. Apparently when you start to warm after near freezing, chilled blood from the extremities begins to return to the heart and sets off ventricular fibrillation. Laskin has several stories of children who survived the night somehow, then dropped dead a few seconds after they stood up in the morning.
      While the stories are interesting enough, Laskin misses the opportunity to discuss what to do if the reader ever finds themselves in similar circumstances (his basic advice is “don’t live in the Dakotas”). The lesson is fairly obvious from the text, though – if you are in any kind of shelter, stay there. As mentioned, schoolteachers who kept their children inside invariably survived with their charges – even in a case where the roof blew off the school. Several of the teachers who lead children out into the storm explained latter that they didn’t have enough fuel for the schoolhouse stove and were convinced the children would freeze to death in the unheated building, ignoring the seemingly obvious fact that subzero in a shelter is vastly better than subzero with a 40 mph wind and blowing, blinding snow (to be completely fair, there were a few farmers that froze to death in their houses; circumstance were somewhat different, though – people came to the schoolhouses almost immediately after the blizzard ended, while isolated farmhouses were ignored until the neighbors dug themselves out and saw to their own problems). There are still a few deaths every year when people ignore the stay-in-shelter principle; their car is stuck in a storm on I-90, they can see the lights of a town just down the road and figure they can walk there in a few minutes and get hot food and a room; their bodies thaw out of the drifts in April. I always have a sleeping bag and a couple of emergency blankets in my car; I hope I’ll be smart enough to use them if the situation ever arises.
    • 4/5
      Thanks to Goodreads friend Melki I have an owned copy that I could read at my leisure. I was able to return a less than pleasant to read library copy as soon as I received it. It was such a pleasure to read a basically pristine copy. The only times I normally get to do that is when I manage to get a new book in the first batch the library lends out. So, I thought this was going to be a 5 star book for me but it wasn’t. I did really like it and I’m glad I read it. It’s a 3 ½ star book. I’m upping it because it’s an important story and it’s unique in writing in such detail about the subject. So the good and the middling and the bad:I admired the in depth research that was done and appreciated the mentions of sources, and there were many. I liked that for those affected there was some background information and post blizzard information about many of them. The biographical information pre-settling in the area and in the U.S. and also the conditions they faced on the prairie, including horrible weather prior to this particular blizzard and other forms of bad luck, added a lot to the account. The people did come alive with all the information given about their lives. I ached for the people who didn’t make it and for their families. Some of the accounts were heartbreaking. I especially ached for the children who didn’t make it; especially those who’d already had difficult lives. The descriptions were phenomenal. The experiences of being in the storm were so well described. I’d had no idea. I learned a lot about blizzards and weather and what life was like on the prairie. The fact that most of these people lived hard lives before the storm was something I felt was crucial to know. It’s an important story and while well known in that area I hadn’t known about this storm or about day to day life in this area at that time. This book does a good job of explaining all that. I’m glad that the reader learns from the start who survives and who does not in some cases. Though there is more to say about the foreshadowing in my third, the bad, paragraph. What I was most impressed with was the description of the experiences of the blizzard. Presented are remarkable, astounding accounts and top-notch research. This isn’t really about the book but I was impressed that the author thanked Erik Larson (one of my favorite non-fiction writers) in his friends and family acknowledgements section. So, large portions of the book were a really slow read for me. I was grateful that I enjoy science including meteorology because there are large sections devoted to the weather. Just weather! Also there was a fair amount about the politics of the weather forecasting at the time. For me it started particularly slowly but once I really got to know some families and individuals and their circumstances, it helped. It was never a page-turner for me though, even though during the parts about the storm itself and some of the aftermath I certainly wanted to know what would happen with everyone. I love maps in books and the included map was very helpful and I frequently referred to it, but many places mentioned were not on the map. I’d have loved 2 maps, the one included and a much more detailed map in addition. While I liked all the background information, the amount devoted to weather in general, other things going on, including politics and some weather events on the east coast post blizzard, for me there was just a tad too much of that. They were interesting but for me took me out of the story a bit. I’d have rather done my own research and read other books to get that much detail. This is a minor quibble because some of that information was helpful to put the blizzard and its effects into context, but while I usually like detail some of the minutiae bored me.What I liked much less or not at all were several things. It’s really choppy. Each individual’s story is told a bit at a time and interspersed with many others’ stories. Sometimes that’s an effective technique for me and it should have worked here when the story was being told chronologically, but I found it annoying and confusing at times. I felt that there was a deliberate attempt to manipulate the readers’ emotions and it often read as a thriller. This account stands on its own and I don’t think it needed the extra drama or suspense. I didn’t like being led to firmly believe certain people must have died only to have them survive or vice versa. There was too much of that. A straight story would have worked best for me. I know this was well researched and accounts of survivors were used but, and this is one of my pet peeves in non-fiction when certain things just can’t be known, I think there is too much about the actions, motivations, thoughts, and feelings of those who died who weren’t with any witnesses who survived. (Of course as I read I thought that a lot but then it turned out some of them were survivors, but not all.) I was so glad that one person survived who I’d given up for dead (view spoiler) but I didn’t enjoy that much the process of getting to the conclusion of what happened to them. Ditto for a few other people. Just a note: All I can say is that human nature doesn’t change. The way the news was handled, to be attention grabbing and in serial form, to hook people to the story/stories as best they could, is exactly what happens today and maybe always has. Also, accounts about the news of heroines and donors and such, the author does touch on this though not enough because all I could think of as I read is how more of the children should have been honored for their bravery and compassion, those who died and those who lived, those who saved others and those who futilely tried their best to do that, doing their best to at least comfort other children. They were inspiring and their stories often extremely distressing. Even though it gets only 3 ½ stars from me I do recommend it to those interested in this blizzard, in life on the prairie, in American and immigrant history (so many people were mentioned I didn’t expect to see in this account!), and in well researched non-fiction. There are 17 pages of source notes, 4 pages of acknowledgements, and an index of 11 pages.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book!!! I had no idea as to the scope of this storm & the history with it all. It takes you back in time & you relive it through their eyes. People were so tough & resilient then!
    • 2/5
      A harrowing tale of January 12, 1888 in the newly settled US plains. The History Channel website puts it like this:

      On this day in 1888, the so-called "Schoolchildren's Blizzard" kills 235 people, many of whom were children on their way home from school, across the Northwest Plains region of the United States. The storm came with no warning, and some accounts say that the temperature fell nearly 100 degrees in just 24 hours.
      It was a Thursday afternoon and there had been unseasonably warm weather the previous day from Montana east to the Dakotas and south to Texas. Suddenly, within a matter of hours, Arctic air from Canada rapidly pushed south. Temperatures plunged to 40 below zero in much of North Dakota. Along with the cool air, the storm brought high winds and heavy snows. The combination created blinding conditions.

      THAT I can understand! However, Laskin takes this story and, instead of making it real to the average reader, bogs down the text with an abundance of technical terms, protracted weather explanations and hard-to-follow story lines. I will take one at a time.

      While I appreciate Laskin's desire to educate me on weather phenomena, his use of meteorological terminology did little to boost my understanding of why this blizzard occurred. Instead, reading the reasons, lows, highs, barometric pressures, and such was like swimming in quicksand. I quickly abandoned careful reading and resorted to skimming - something I am sure no author desires from his audience.

      The weather causes and effects explained in a careful scientific manner went on and on, bogging me down regularly. That, added to the character-heavy ramblings, and I was thoroughly confused chapter after chapter. There was almost a feeling of "oh, by the way, since I mentioned him, let me tell you his life story." I would have rather been introduced to a few key families and followed them throughout the story.

      Because of the subject matter, and to honor the over 200 people that perished, I really wanted to like this book. However, I am sorry to say that I cannot recommend this one.
    • 4/5
      The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin is a fascinating book about a powerful, freak blizzard that occurred in the upper Midwest of America on January 12, 1888. I found this an extremely moving, well researched book that caught and held my attention from cover to cover.The author follows a few families that settled in this area that encompassed the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska and Minnesota. Giving us the history and background of these families made what they endured through this blizzard all the more touching. Striking quickly and deadly, the blizzard became known as the Children’s Blizzard as so many school children were caught up in it. Either being stranded at school with their teachers or being sent out to find their way home. What happened to these children is both heart rending and, at times, miraculous.Details on the scientific background of weather forecasting is given in simple terms which I found readable and helped to move the story forward. I was surprised at the knowledge that they did have in the 1880’s, but with a storm that approached so rapidly and was so severe, there really appeared to be little the Weather Bureau could do. Of course, that didn’t appear to stop a certain amount of fact spinning in the days immediately after this tragedy.An interesting book that once more gives proof that nature should always be respected and when dealing with weather, it’s better to err on the side of caution.
    • 3/5
      This was NOT the time to read this one as the current blizzard roars up the East Coast; I should have waited until next summer!A moving chronicle of the terrifying "children's blizzard" of January 12, 1888 in the Upper Midwest, Dakota Territory, Nebraska, Minnesota, even reaching down to Iowa, Texas, and Louisiana--why and how it arose, the severity, personal stories of the pioneers and their families. They were mostly immigrants from Norway, Germany, and a cluster of German Mennonites from Ukraine. Most of the victims were schoolchildren and their teachers. At least 200-500 lives were lost. Tracing the path of the storm, the author followed individual stories. So much weather data was overwhelming, but I enjoyed the personal factor, regretting that the stories were broken up. We leave one group, follow another and another, then return to the first group. The author explains in excruciating detail the progress of hypothermia and of frostbite and how death can result for each, using what might have happened to a group of the Mennonite boys and to several girls with frostbitten feet. He contrasts the primitive weather "indications" of that time of the Army Signal Corps with the Weather Service sophisticated forecasting of today. All in all a fascinating look at one of the major disasters of the U.S.
    • 4/5
      A heartbreaking well written book on one of the terrible blizzards. Compares well to Isaac's Storm. First place to a detailed description of living (or not) through a blizzard that will have you pulling up the blanket on even a warm night. Also covers the science of weather as it stood then and now. The bureaucracy of what would become the weather bureau. How the settlers of the upper Midwest came to be there and what their lives were like. In the actions that brought the Mennonites to the area you can see the forces that lead to WW1. In the farm conditions you can see what lead to the Populist Party. The author's contention that this blizzard lives in the area's memory doesn't agree with my experience of living there.
    • 3/5
      Laskin went WAAAY back to the old country and brought the people onto the Dakota-Nebraska prairie through a long set of excerpts. It would have been more interesting to have been able to read the original source documents. The actual storm and immediate circumstances were rather abruptly presented. I've seen this type of literature done much better by others.
    • 5/5
      Talk about a page-turner. This is one of those books where you read the blurbs (which say things like "terrifying but beautifully written" and "reads like a thriller") after you've read the book, and you think "Yeah, that's about right." This is a non-fiction account of the blizzard that swept over the Great Plains on January 12, 1888. It was an event that defined the consciousness of a broad area of the nation, and continues to define it to this day. The story itself is heartrending: the first warm, mild morning in weeks turned instantly into one of the coldest, deadliest blizzards of all time. Farmers were caught in their fields, ranchers were caught tending to their animals. Worst of all, children were caught in schoolhouses, many of which could not provide adequate shelter through such a storm. By the time January 13 rolled around, the prairie was scattered with hundreds of dead bodies, many of them children (thus the name given to the blizzard, from which the book takes its title). A telling excerpt:

      Today, aside from a few fine marble headstones in country graveyards and the occasionial roadside historical marker, not a trace of the blizzard of 1888 remains on the prairie. Yet in the imagination and identity of the region, the storm is as sharply etched as ever: This is a place where blizzards kill children on their way home from school.
      [Emphasis his.]

      Laskin does a remarkable job with the book. The reasons for the blizzard's power and deadliness are complicated, bound up not just in the weather itself but in the history of the region (and the U.S. in general), in patterns of European migration, in military affairs, even in religion. The author weaves these lines together into a gripping story; it's difficult to put the book down, even as the text moves in and out of such disparate subjects. I should add that his writing was good enough to make the story of a blizzard tangible to me even as I read it on 90° days in June.

      This is one of the two best books I've read all year, and one of the best I've ever read period. It's books like this that make me love the historical-nonfiction genre. And it's stories like this that, in spite of themselves, bind me to the Great Plains.
    • 4/5
      I enjoy books that capture the flavor of an era, and this book certainly does that. The blizzard of 1888, by all accounts, was the "perfect storm," a confluence of patterns that sent a wall of snow, wind, and cold (almost literally) sweeping across the Dakotas and Nebraska killing many people and children who had left for school with inadequate clothing because the weather had been unusually mild that morning. In one city the temperature dropped 50 degrees in a matter of hours. A tragic story unfolds as the author follows several families before, during, and after the event.

      I am actually surprised that given the conditions, more people didn't die.
    • 5/5
      This book not only covers the gripping tale of the children stranded in the blizzard, it also tells of the meteorology of the times. It inspired me to look into more novels written about people struggling to survive adverse weather conditions.
    • 4/5
      Given my unnatural obsession with the Laura Ingalls Wilder book, "Long Winter," it's not shocking that I enjoyed this book. (Well, as much as one can enjoy reading about frozen children.) I'll only reiterate what the other reviewers have said: there's a lot of boring crap about meteorology and the politics of the weather service. I skimmed over a lot of that; I got the gist of it, but that was enough for me.

      Also, reading it on my Kindle, I was fairly shocked when I finished the book....at only 75% of the way through! The last quarter appears to be footnotes and the like. Surprising, and a bit disappointing.
    • 5/5
      As a child, I was obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. I read them each over again times beyond count, but my very favorite was The Long Winter. It accounted how Laura's family and the town of De Smet, South Dakota, struggled to survive a brutal winter of low food and fuel. A morbid book, to be sure--I guess it's no surprise that I've grown up to write post-apocalyptic tales of survival, and I still have a keen interest in historical tales of survival as well.As I began to read The Children's Blizzard, I wasn't surprised to find that Laskin was also inspired by Wilder's The Long Winter. Wilder's terrible winter was the one of 1880-1881; the titular blizzard of this book took place January 12th, 1888 and was truly a freak storm.The media stories a century ago often called the incident 'the School-Children's Blizzard,' because so many of the dead and maimed were children and teachers. They died in the grip of a suffocating, sub-zero storm, or froze to death in their school or home. Hundreds, across Nebraska and the Dakota Territory. Laskin takes a very thorough approach and begins by talking about these pioneers and where they were from: Norway or Germany, Mennonite or Quaker, they came west seeking a promised land of plenty. He focuses on several particular families, and in doing so, creates terrible tension because it's impossible to guess who will live or who will die. This is creative non-fiction at its finest. The science is a tad daunting as it describes the unique elements world-wide that come together to create such an unusually powerful storm--measurements state that the temperature dropped eighteen degrees in three minutes--and the manner that freezing kills the body; while the science is important, overall this is a tale of humanity, and that's the real story here.I am most definitely keeping this book on my shelf and will be referring to it for years to come.
    • 4/5
      From Sebastien Junger's recounting of the fateful events surrounding the Andrea Gail in October of 1991 to the terrible havoc from the recent tornadoes in Texas, the power and destruction of storms has always been strangely intriguing. Maybe it's because we know next to nothing about how to control them or how to accurately predict them, and that fear of the unpredictable drives us to try to understand them. Nowadays, we have radar and weather balloons and computers that assist with figuring out what makes those powerful storms tick, and even then, we still are faced with a so much uncertainty about them.In "The Children's Blizzard