There is no antidote against the opium of Time. — sir thomas browne, urn burial

• The Distancers |
• Storm Kings |
• Wicked River |
• New Kings |
• Saving His Life

Books

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“The Distancers: An American Memoir”
August 13 from Vintage

From the 19th-century immigrants who settled a small Midwestern farm, through the Great Depression and World War II, to the proud aunts and uncles with whom Lee Sandlin spent the summers of his youth, The Distancers is a starkly beautiful story in which the lost details of everyday American life — the home-brewed beer of Prohibition, rail-riding through the Dust Bowl, the forgotten summer pageants of the heartland — are recalled together with the hidden dramas of several generations of an American family. Here is a recreation of a world long since vanished, in which the author learned lifetimes of traditional values, including the essential art of keeping one's distance.

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“Storm Kings: The Untold History of America's First Tornado Chasers”
From Pantheon Books

Lee Sandlin retraces America's fascination and unique relationship to tornadoes, and recreates the origins of meteorology, and the quirky, pioneering, weather-obsessed scientists who helped change America.

In Storm Kings, Lee Sandlin retraces America's fascination and unique relationship to tornadoes. From Ben Franklin's early experiments, to "the great storm debates" of the nineteenth century, to heartland life in the early twentieth century, Sandlin shows how tornado chasing helped foster the birth of meteorology, recreating with vivid descriptions some of the most devastating storms in America's history, including the "Tri-State tornado" of 1925 and the Peshtigo "fire tornado," whose deadly path of destruction was left encased in glass.

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“Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild”
from Pantheon Books

A riveting narrative look at one of the most colorful, dangerous, and peculiar places in America’s historical landscape: the strange, wonderful, and mysterious Mississippi River of the 19th century.

Beginning in the early 1800s and climaxing with the siege of Vicksburg, Wicked River takes us back to a time before the Mississippi was dredged into a shipping channel, and before Mark Twain romanticized it into myth. Drawing on an array of unique, suspenseful, and bizarre first-hand accounts, Lee Sandlin brings to life a place where river pirates brush elbows with future presidents and religious visionaries share passage with thieves; a world unto itself, where every night, near the levees of the big river towns, hundreds of boats gather to form huge dusk-to-dawn cities dedicated to music, drinking, and gambling. Here is a minute by minute account of Natchez being flattened by a tornado; the harbor in St. Louis crushed by a massive ice floe; hidden, nefarious celebrations of Mardi Gras; the sinking of the Sultana, the worst naval disaster in American history. And here is the Mississippi itself: gorgeous, perilous, unpredictable and unstoppable, lifeblood to the communities that rose and fell along its banks.

An exuberant, vivid work of Americana — at once history, culture, geography-from a writer of rare and illuminating insight and eloquence, Wicked River is a grand epic that shows a forgotten society on the edge of revolutionary change.

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