On an unseasonably warm winter day in the Great Plains, a ferocious blizzard suddenly blew up out of nowhere, and soon 500 people (mostly children) were dead. A harrowing story from the author of Braving the Elements; with an eight-city author tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

There are actually two books in this volume. The first is the tragic story of the January 1888 Great Plains blizzard that claimed the lives of over 100 schoolchildren, many of whom were dismissed from their classrooms by well-meaning teachers to try to safely reach their homes during one of the deadliest winter storms in US history, and the children's brave immigrant parents, who had settled in the Dakotas and Nebraska only to find themselves engaged in a constant battle against the elements. Laskin focuses on five of these families and describes the fates of their children, often in horrific detail. The second story, told in alternating chapters, traces the inner workings of the weather arm of the US Army Signal Corps and its desperate, futile attempts to warn Plains residents about this deadly, fast-moving storm. Laskin is at his best when he relates the heartbreaking stories of the storm's victims; the chapters on weather history interrupt the book's flow. Nevertheless, this is an important work that should be read by every resident of the Great Plains. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. J. A. Boughter University of Nebraska at Omaha

Popular historian Laskin (Partisans, 2000, etc.) gives an engrossing if speculative account of a brutal 1888 blizzard that signaled the end of optimism on the Great Plains. "The tragedy of the January 12 blizzard was that the bad timing extended across a region and cut through the shared experiences of an entire population," asserts the author. Laskin shrewdly takes a broad historical view, arguing that the snowstorm--which killed hundreds, including numerous schoolchildren--demonstrated the folly of settling the Dakota and Nebraska territories. In his telling, scores of Germans, Scandinavians, and persecuted Ukrainian Mennonites found irresistible American railroad agents' promises of free grassland prairie homesteads in "one of the most beautiful climates in the world." Though the land was indeed spacious, it proved capricious and unforgiving of the immigrants' naivetÉ, besetting them with locusts, fires, snowstorms, droughts, and other seeming "acts of God." Still, nothing compared to the 1888 blizzard, as its stoic survivors' awed narratives make clear. Precursor storms arrived throughout 1887, devastating the open-range system of cattle management. (Theodore Roosevelt's losses were particularly severe.) When temperatures rose unaccountably on January 12, the hapless settlers, unaware of what such oddities portended, assumed the warmth was more than momentary. Laskin intercuts between their recollections and the fledgling weather forecast service provided by the War Department's Signal Corps, headed by notoriously incompetent martinet Adolphus Greely, who serves as the primary villain here. Clearly fascinated with forecasting's infancy, the author leaves open the question of whether quicker communications or less interference by Greely might have helped save the far-flung settlers. Some children owed their lives to plucky schoolteachers who sequestered them in one-room schoolhouses overnight, burning desks for warmth; many others perished, snow-blind, only yards from inhabited structures. The blizzard's toll provided fodder for the nation's newspapers, which highlighted maudlin tales of heroism and tragedy; it also forced the transfer in 1891 of forecasting responsibilities to the Department of Agriculture. A suspenseful disaster narrative. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In 1888, a sudden, violent blizzard swept across the American plains, killing hundreds of people, many of them children on their way home from school. As Laskin (Partisans) writes in this gripping chronicle of meteorological chance and human folly and error, the School Children's Blizzard, as it came to be known, was "a clean, fine blade through the history of the prairie," a turning point in the minds of the most steadfast settlers: by the turn of the 20th century, 60% of pioneer families had left the plains. Laskin shows how portions of Minnesota, Nebraska and the Dakotas, heavily promoted by railroads and speculators, represented "land, freedom, hope" for thousands of impoverished European immigrants-particularly Germans and Scandinavians-who instead found an unpredictable, sometimes brutal environment, a "land they loved but didn't really understand." Their stories of bitter struggle in the blizzard, which Laskin relates via survivors' accounts and a novelistic imagination, are consistently affecting. And Laskin's careful consideration of the inefficiencies of the army's inexpert weather service and his chronicle of the storm's aftermath in the papers (differences in death counts provoked a national "unseemly brawl") add to this rewarding read. Agent, Jill Kneerim. (Nov.) Forecast: Praise from Erik Larson and Ivan Doig, a nod from the B&N Discover program, and book club attention (it's an alternate for BOMC, Literary Guild and the History Book Club) should help this title stand out. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Adult/High School-That 1888 January day on the northern plains was bright and warm-the first mild weather in several weeks-leading many children to attend school without coats, boots, hats, or mittens. A number of students were caught in the sudden storm that hit later that day. Laskin details this event-the worst blizzard anyone in those parts ever encountered. It not only took the lives of hundreds of settlers, but also formed a significant crack in the westward movement and helped to cause a movement out. The author introduces five pioneer families, beginning with why they left the old country. The personalization of these settlers breathes life into this history and holds readers spellbound. Laskin devotes several chapters to the meteorology of storms, especially this one, and the politics and history of the Army Signal Corps, which ran a fledgling weather service at the time. Readers are then led through the storm and its effects on the featured families as well as on many others. Some teachers kept students at school, burning desks to stay warm overnight; some tried to keep students in but were unsuccessful; and some led them out, not realizing how dangerous it was. A few children and adults who got lost somehow managed to survive covered by snow, then died when they got to their feet in the morning. Laskin explains why, and delves into other effects of prolonged exposure to cold. A gripping story, well told.-Judy McAloon, Potomac Library, Prince William County, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Though rudimentary, weather forecasting in 1888 was capable of predicting a major winter storm. For the upper Great Plains, full of homesteading immigrants from Norway, Germany, and Russia, the weather sentinel was army officer Thomas Woodruff, posted in St. Paul, Minnesota. The meteorological data Woodruff worked with in January 1888, but failed to appreciate, portended a devastating blizzard. This is but one dimension in Laskin's account of a disaster that claimed between 250 and 500 lives. Replete with stoic fact and touching pathos, his history also encompasses the pioneers in Nebraska, the Dakota Territory, and Minnesota whom the snowy whirlwinds visited with frigid death; hypothermia's physiological process forms yet another aspect of Laskin's narrative. It is a perceptive presentation, evoking lives--many those of children--unnoticed by history but for the tragedy of this storm. Schools were in session when the tempest roared across the plain; teachers, as Laskin recounts, made varied and fateful decisions about saving their students. An adroit, sensitive drama and a skillful addition to a popular genre. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2004 Booklist