Children’s Blizzard This was part of my Winter 2013 DISASTER! Themed read.I don’t know where to start. You can read about disasters, and frequently, they’re off in remote mountains- the Andes, the Himalayans, etc., and this geographical distance creates a buffer between the reader and the book. You feel terrible for the people going through the ordeal, you can sympathize with their pain, but even if you’ve been in mountains it’s hard to imagine the remoteness and the vastness of some of those ecological systems. Then you read a book about home. Home, for me, is the plains. I was born and bred into Nebraska culture, and other than a 5 year respite in North Carolina, I’ve been in Nebraska and will be in Nebraska for the rest of my life. In reading this book about the blizzard that left hundreds of school children dead on the plains of Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota, it was very, startlingly real.You see, other places, like Chicago, or the South, has changed so much. The population of the prairie has grown, we have buildings made out of concrete and not sod, but so much is still the same. People can still die in blizzards, it happened last year. If your car is stranded on the highway in a blizzard, then there isn’t going to be relief for miles around. There are still stretches of fields where you can’t see a single building. You can be very much on your own here. Then there is the culture, we are still very very German and Scandinavian. We help ourselves, and then our neighbors (when they need it but before they have to ask for it, so we don’t insult their honor), we are insular, we are thrifty, we are reserved (except on Husker game day Saturdays), we are strong and we know how to do things ourselves. And we are almost always ready, prepared, and waiting for the other shoe to drop. I didn’t realize this about us until I moved to the South. No one in North Carolina ever had jumper cables, and I had cables that could nearly stretch 20 feet, because when it’s THAT cold outside you don’t have minutes to maneuver your cars closer. If you’ve got someone that can give you a jump, you take it, and no one wants to dick around. To see that same culture struggle in the face of this blizzard, to hear the names of towns where I’ve been, and to see last names of people who I know, who I have to wonder, was this your ancestor? Was I just privy to family disaster? My family didn’t immigrate to America until much later, but my husband’s family would have been here, farming right where we are farming now. The Cooks, Eckhardts, and Heuertz would have been here. They were Germans from Russia, they usually came as a whole town, and now I cannot help but ask them next time I see them, “do you know who died? Someone had to have. There didn’t seem to be a family that wasn’t touched. Was you grandpa missing fingers? An ear? Did he die trying to reach the cattle? Do you know how they made it through? What’s more impressive is that people stayed. They stayed through drought followed by hail storms and tornadoes, through blizzards that gave way to prairie fires and storms of locusts. They stayed because this was their land, and they’d never have a chance to own land this fertile and tillable again. They put their blood and sweat into this ground, and it kept taking, it took their food, their energy, their sons and daughters. But they were not going to leave. And now, this is our land. I can go to sleep at night behind walls that aren’t going to blow away, under a ceiling made of more than sod so that snakes and voles don’t drop onto me out of the blue, but I can still hear that wind howling and roaring across the plains, never ceasing, always crying. Some things don’t change.To read my review of my Natural Disaster Themed read which included 10 different disaster books click link: Here!….I realize this might be more of a review of the prairie than of the book. The book was excellent. It will show you how we still are, and it will make you appreciate homesteading and pioneering like nothing else can. It’s a must read for weather aficionados. It was a great book, brilliantly researched, poignantly told, and, I thought, put together in a fine manner. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/mag...I highly recommend the above article and pictures.
"The Children's Blizzard" is a historical account of a blizzard that occurred on the Great Plains in 1888 that has been remembered ever since. It is a mixture of straight historical reporting, weather analysis, medical facts and Ken Burns' style storytelling. It makes for a compelling read, although some parts are better than others.Obviously, the most compelling aspects of the book are the people, and particularly, the children who were caught in the storm. There are numerous stories about the fates of those who lived and those who died. In addition, there is an unwinding of the some of the lives of the survivors and what happened to them after the storm. The personalities and family histories are all interesting. Laskin delves into how the families got to the Great Plains, many of them Russian or German immigrants. The stories of their initial journeys are interesting as well.Also compelling in a gruesome way are the descriptions of the progression of hypothermia that would have played out in the victims of the blizzard. In addition, frostbite and its treatments and after effects are discussed. Gangrene, amputations and the state of surgery in the late 19th century are all included.Less interesting to me was the description of the personalities and infighting in the Army Signal Corps, and the statement of the reasons that basically no warning was given. One exception is the account of General Greeley's north pole expedition, but that is more of a flashback. The author also is keenly interested in weather. Most people probably are not that interested, but the reader must plow through a lot of meteorological narrative to get through the book.Still, it is worth the time to read. I have relatives who came from that part of the country and who live there now, which made the book interesting. Anyone whose families came from Europe to the United States will be fascinated by the trips they took overseas. However, the most compelling aspect of this book remains the stories of those who found themselves caught in the storm and what happened to them as a result.
Do You like book The Children's Blizzard (2005)?
The children's blizard of 1888 is a well researched and well written book. On Jan. 12, 1888, the sun came up on a beautiful day with moderating temperatures in the Dakotas and Minnesota. Many children went to scholl without their boots, hats, gloves and warm coats. Mary farmers ventured out to work on projects away from the farms. In the early afternoon, the weather made a dramatic change, from warm and sunny to a blizzard. Many children were either trapped at school or caught in the blizzard as they made thier way home. This is the story of their plights.Some teachers refused to let the children leave the schoolhouses. This seemed to be a wise decision at first, but as the blizzard increased in intensity, the scools ran out of wood and literally disintegrated in the wind. The bravery of many of the teachers save the lives of many of their students, but this was still a tragedy since many lives were lost. Many people froze to death in their tracks. Some farmers and school children were able to save themselves by burrowing into corn schalks. Some children were found the next moring frozen to the ground and miraculously still alive. This was a well written and researched story. I enjoyed the book very much since I like a book about history or weather and this was both.
—Peggy
A very disappointing read given the true nature of the Blizzard of 1888 , which had all the elements of Shakspearean tragedy: a fierce, raging storm descends upon the prairie states at exactly the worst time,in the afternoon of an unseasonably warm day in which many children had gone to school poorly dressed and folks were working in their fields without warm clothing. Added to that was the fact that many of the people afflicted were recent immigrants to the plains, who had had little experience with harsh midwestern winters Like lambs to the slaughter, you can feel their innocence and pluck steering them straight into darkness..What goes wrong here is that Laskin pads the history with deadeningly dull and detailed meterological information(impossible for anyone but a degreed weatherman to decipher), plus the inside working of the young US weather agency,plus the minutiae of back-story on the villages the pioneers came from,throwing name after name into the mix so that one can't come to know any of the individuals as fully fleshed people,plus speculation as to the thoughts and feelings of people who actually died, and then as a finale adds gruesome descriptions of how the human body implodes while freezing to death and after undergoing frostbite. The overall effect of this book is that of sensationalizing a true tragedy, without showing sufficient respect and compassion for the people and the communities who lived it.If I were a living descendent of one of the children whose agonizing death by hypothermia was so vividly and horrifically depicted, I would be indignant that this poor child's demise is only used to add dramatic flair. This book was calculated to attract attention,sell briskly and be made into movies/documentaries.There is no heart in this,only ego and greed.
—Pat
I am a huge fan of non-fiction reading, and I was super pumped to find this exciting story on a little known part of history at the used book store. As a life-long resident of the mid-west, I am certainly not ignorant to "blizzards" and whiteouts. I know how much they can inconvenience a person in the 21st Century, so I can only imagine what a disaster it was for those living in the late 1800s in their sod houses, reliance on crops they produce, and multi-mile walks to school. This book was supposedly about the Children's Blizzard (also called the schoolhouse blizzard) (because all blizzards were named something back then- just look to Laura Ingalls Wilder to explain that) in February 1888. However, less than half of book actually focused on those events. Because this was a collection of first-hand stories, Laskin assumed we would need to be invested in each one of the players. This included (sometimes) excruciatingly boring family histories of each family, going back decades to their homeland. I understand we were meant to get an idea of how difficult life was for early settlers to realize the American Dream, but much of the information could have been summarized. For example, I surely couldn't be the only reader who didn't need to know that the "weatherman" they had at the time (which was admittedly a terrible job in his day) had served in X in the Civil War (after training under X during years Y-Z and so forth), and the poor fellow didn't get married until he was 32 (much too old to start a new life) and so on. (He did sound like he had a rockin' mustache though!) I might have been interested in what it entailed to be a weatherman during the day (training wise), but actually knowing 30 pages of his backstory made me skim (I'll admit it) and the details were never relevant at later points in the book. My general feeling about this book can be summed up as such: The subject of the book was intense and fascinating. The book itself was not.
—Laura
