Book Review: What Stands in a Storm

What Stands in a Storm:Three Days in the Worst Superstorm to Hit the South's Tornado Alleyby Kim CrossAtria Books, 2015Just as surely as natural disasters spawn heartbreak and property damage, they also spawn books. Whether it's the Boxing Day tsunami or Hurricane Sandy or the Tangshen earthquake, the allure of chronicling catastrophe is as irresistible as it is wistful, and it's certainly no slur on the survivors or their beloved dead to point out that the books are all intensely similar to each other. In fact, it's one of the only literary instances imaginable where the furry, rounded familiarity of cliché might actually be a tonic to the reader. After all, as most of the journeyman writers of such books will piously point out, the point here isn't rhetorical but commemorative.It's a flimsy enough kind of defense, but it absolutely rules these disaster-dissections, including Kim Cross's new book What Stand in a Storm, a gripping, dramatic account of the three-day stretch from April 24^th to 27^th , 2011, during which a record-breaking series of tornados struck the state of Alabama (including 62 on the 27^th alone), doing $11 billion in damage and claiming well over 300 human lives. Cross takes the standard approach to her task, anchoring her story on a handful of individuals as a way of personalizing the experience of those three horrendous days, and she slowly builds the drama in a predictable series of chapters with telegraphing titles like “The Calm,” “The Prelude,” “Safe Place,” “The Search,” and “Picking Up the Pieces.” She's a very observant, very empathetic writer, so all of it feels very natural.She's also a first-rate popularizer of the science behind the storms. In the broad panoply of natural disasters that routinely afflict the surface of this planet, earthquakes make you feel completely helpless, monsoons induce awe, fire evokes stubborn resistance, but nothing is quite so sharply frightening as a powerful tornado sweeping toward your home wreathed in thunderstorms, and Cross captures something of that dread very vividly:

As vapor became liquid, the state change released latent heat – the fuel of thunderstorms – feeding the air fountain with a new surge of power. The top of the funnel cooled rapidly, crested over, and sank to the ground, only to be warmed again by the surface and sucked back into the storm. These rushing currents created a self-perpetuating loop, a monster that fed itself. The storms mushroomed upward into the towers that loomed thirty thousand feet and higher, grazed by screaming upper level winds that sculpted their classic anvil tops, and caused the storms to tilt and rotate. The thunderstorms throbbed with power, releasing more energy than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. And these self-feeding monsters stalked steadily east.

The personalities of the people involved are captured just as vividly although with a good deal more rote melodrama. Because Cross went to Alabama and did extensive kitchen-table interviews, her families all shop over at the Piggly-Wiggly and love Jesus and are fiercely protective of each other. No bigots. No jerks. Nobody you'd, for instance, in your darker moments, hope might be visited by a superstorm or two. And perhaps predictably, this is where the bulk of the book's cliched writing slips in, as in her otherwise very memorable portrait of celebrated meteorologist James Spann:

The computer models were not always right. But atmospheric conditions looked alarmingly similar to those of past outbreaks, and models were all pointing to a day when the sky would convulse with long-lived supercells bearing families of tornados. He expected to see funnels of unfathomable size and power that could stay on the ground for a hundred miles, maybe more. Spann felt certain this was going to be a red-letter day.

In the end, What Stands in a Storm does what all the best of these disaster books do: it erects a dignified, mournful monument in the cemetery of the imagination, a touching if slightly anodyne tribute to the survivors and the dead alike. Cross writes with more than enough energy and grace to make her book interesting even to those readers lucky enough never to have made the acquaintance of a tornado (let alone the monster storms that not only touch down but drag, pulling apart everything in their path like saltwater taffy on a hot day). And readers in “Tornado Alley,” needless to say, will treasure it.