Author of Big Weather Responds to Charles Doswell
From Amazon
I don't know why it's taken me so long to get around to doing this, but here goes. I wrote Big Weather and am bemused but not surprised by the intellectually dishonest review by Charles Doswell III, who, as a university professor, should know better than to start with an attack ad hominem, the lowest form of argument--he calls me a carpet-bagger. Things don't improve from there. It's not a review. It's a psuedo-review, a personal attack posing as a review, which is just one of the reasons why it's dishonest.
I wrote Big Weather because I was curious about why, as a culture, we seem so fascinated by catastrophic weather. I wanted to know why it was that a company like The Weather Channel could exist in the first place. I was following a line of thought first developed in 1962 by Daniel Boorstin, in his book The Image: A Guide to Psuedo-Events in America, in which Boorstin warns about a great menace that was emerging then in American culture. He used that word, "menace," and the menace wasn't poverty or war or class division, or anything like that. It was, as he called it, "unreality." The problem of "unreality" in our culture. He identified three areas in culture that are not prone to advertising or political manipulation--the first was crime reporting, the second was sports, and the third was the weather. The weather has become for us a base-line measure for what's real. You can create a company like The Weather Channel, which spins the weather to a fare-the-well, but if a storm decides to wipe the Weather Channel off the earth, there's nothing anyone can do about it. It's the unreal that gives us so much trouble, that seems to be something it isn't, that seems to be spontaneous but turns out to have been orchestrated for other reasons, much like Charles Doswell's "review," for instance.
My point is this: I wrote Big Weather because I was pursuing a line of intellectual and artistic thought that meant something important to me, personally, and seemed to touch many other people as well, not just those who were drawn, like me to the center of the United States to witness large storms. I found it strange that we seemed so fixated by catastrophic weather, on the one hand, but couldn't seem to get off the dime about climate change (this was in 2004). I know weather isn't the same thing as climate, but global warming seemed to be just about the biggest big weather story of them all. I had to address it at some point and to address the campaign of mis-information about global warming that was waged so successfully by the Bush Administration. Doing that really seemed to annoy some reviewers of this book. Wow. Struck a nerve, did I? The truth, of course, came out soon after the publication of my book, that Bush administration political appointees, many with no scientific credentials, doctored or edited scientific reports, slowed down research, and created a smoke screen in the debate about global warming. The book also was and is an inquiry into how the sublime, the terrifying disorienting force of nature, in this case, attracts us, still speaks to us, from across the centuries. I was, also, interested in reporting a debased kind of sublime as well--a commodified sublime which I called "catastrophilia." Anyway, I hope you can see that my motives were good. And if it sounds too bookish and brainy, well, I filled Big Weather with enough chasing and other forms of malarkey to keep me amused, at any rate, and I hope you as well. Four years later, I'm still very, very proud of this book and, aside from a few silly mistakes that inevitably escape one's best effort to be as accurate as possible, I stand by everything that I say in it.
The field of severe storm weather is filled with wonderful and fascinating people, but it's not big enough, it seems, to allow me and Charles Doswell's ego to coexist. Now we're getting closer to the truth, I suspect. Too bad his psuedo-review is the first thing you see when you inquire into Big Weather. Try reading the actual book. I'm not saying this because it's going to make me any money. It won't. The book's long out of print. But you can still get it and read it, either in the library or through a used book store on Amazon, or elsewhere. Give it a try. There's plenty to keep you engaged, but if you're looking only for entertainment without reflection, then I'll be the first to suggest that you try another book instead.
Mark Svenvold
Big Weather, Big Disappointment
From Amazon
I am fortunate in that I did not actually spend money on this book. I do not know about the poetic aspects of the book, but I do know that the author treated many of the people in this book insultingly. I skipped around a bit thinking that perhaps only the beginning would be colored by condescension but remained disappointed. If you want a good book that exposes the relationships between big weather and the people who live through it read F5 by Mark Levine. If you want a good book about big weather read any book other than the one this review is about.
Poetic prose, wide ranging topics
From Amazon
Big Weather is a lot about weather and a little about weather, all at the same time. How come? Because Mark Svenvold can describe physical phenomena in prose approaching poetry, and the topic allows him to introduce the reader to multiple other venues.
The title attracts those of us who need to deal with weather. I fly light airplanes and taught weather as a major chapter in aviation ground school class curricula. Even so, tornadoes are a fish pilots do not swim with. We race the other way, like herring trying to fly when the whales arrive to corral them with air bubbles. So on a daily basis, pilots need to know more about, for example, the Current Icing Potential on the ADDS Web, or the convective SIGMETS, which describe the wide range of turbulence generators.
But whatever makes you open Big Weather, you will find, in the first paragraph of page one, the rich ability of a poet to describe the factual in impressionistic ways.
A few pages later, you will meet Matt Biddle, his hero.
And it keeps getting better. Want to know about Chaos? Svenvold will tell you about Lorenz, and then you can read James Gleick.
His mention of Heisenberg might remind you that Werner was once asked if he had any questions for God. He responded "Yes, I will ask him to explain relativity and turbulence, and I think he will be able to explain relativity".
Or, when Svenvold brings up Pliny the Elder, describing a vortex, you can pick up John Mc Phee's "Control of Nature" and read how Pliny dropped dead when Vesuvius erupted under his nose.
Think tornadoes are all violence? Svenvold will connect you with their sublime elements, and with Dionysius Longinus, sublime's first champion.
Science, art, science, literature, science, psychology, geography, history, philosophy. On and on it goes.
Elmer Mc Curdy is another good yarn. Get that too.
Fascinating topic, ho-hum execution
From Amazon
In "Big Weather," Mark Svenvold recalls the time he spent in 2004 tagging along with veteran storm chaser Matt Biddle. The book is meant to be about storm chaser culture and associated elements, but uneven storytelling mars what would otherwise be a very cool book.
Svenvold is a poet-in-residence at Fordham University, and it shows. In some cases (such as Chapter 4: Catastrophilia), it shows a little too much. When Svenvold is talking about being on a chase, or the people who are part of and/or affected by chase culture, he's great. When he tries to get flowery, it bogs down the book. I'm sure there was a point to Chapter 4; I just wish he had gotten to it sooner, with a clear path to it.
And that's the overall problem with "Big Weather." For a topic that is, at its essence, unpredictable, crazy, and hold-your-breath heart stopping, he doesn't always convey that. I know that there's a lot of waiting associated with chasing, but Svenvold made storm chasing seem downright dreamy. I think the book would have been better if he had stuck with the journalistic, straight-to-the-point style he used when describing different chase events.
I don't agree with other reviewers that say he is anti-Christian, anti-Bush, or anti-other chasers. I think he was just trying to be objective while observing the people who not only live in Tornado Alley, but are also residents of the Bible Belt. Perhaps the book would have been less offensive if he had been more objective, but I don't think that's his style.
One place where I did think he was offensive (or at least borderline) was his constant referral to the people in the chasing industry as "geeks" or "dorks." I wasn't sure if that was an in-joke he was repeating or if he was being purposely derogatory.
I think, in a way, this was meant to be Svenvold's "expose" type book, just like recent bestsellers "The Nanny Diaries" or "The Devil Wears Prada," except, of course, he didn't try to gloss his experiences by hiding them in fiction. It might have been a more interesting read if he did.
Overall, it's worth checking it out from the library. But there are better memoirs out there that are worth savoring and keeping.
Supposed to be About WEATHER
From Amazon
Big Weather? WRONG!!!! This guy covers philosophy, map making,religion, his philosophical ideas to the point of nausea, old world history, pages & pages about Mary MacLane, oh yeah, and almost as an afterthought there are some pages about weather & chasing. But still laced with his philosophy.
NOT a book for anyone except maybe self styled "intellectuals"