Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2015
272 pages
Genre: Science, Health and the Environment
Publication Information
A spellbinding combination of storytelling, art, and science.
Weather is the very air we breathe - it shapes our daily lives and alters the course of history. In Thunder & Lightning, Lauren Redniss tells the story of weather and humankind through the ages.
This wide-ranging work roams from the driest desert on earth to a frigid island in the Arctic, from the Biblical flood to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Redniss visits the headquarters of the National Weather Service, recounts top-secret rainmaking operations during the Vietnam War, and examines the economic impact of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Drawing on extensive research and countless interviews, she examines our own day and age, from our most personal decisions - Do I need an umbrella today? - to the awesome challenges we face with global climate change.
Redniss produced each element of Thunder & Lightning: the text, the artwork, the covers, and every page in between. She created many of the images using the antiquated printmaking technique copper plate photogravure etching. She even designed the book's typeface.
The result is a book unlike any other: a spellbinding combination of storytelling, art, and science.
"Starred Review. A highly atmospheric, entertainingly earnest, and intimate engrossment with the world's most popular topic of conversation." - Kirkus
"Thunder & Lighting is a fascinating meditation on how climate affects the earth's landscape and the lives inhabiting it, but also how the landscape of a book - the layout of its text, the images on its pages - impacts the telling of a story. This is an important book about a topic that couldn't be more important to us all." - Rebecca Skloot
"In Thunder & Lightning, Lauren Redniss combines her own dual punch of expressive art and impressive erudition to give an entirely new take on all that happens above our heads. This is an illuminated book that is also an illuminating one." - Adam Gopnik
"Lauren Redniss's Thunder & Lightning is such a strange and wonderful thing, the work of a first-class mind that refuses to submit to any categories or precedent. It's the way you wish science would always be taught—with a mix of stories and facts, legend and hard science." - Dave Eggers
"Beautiful and totally original." - Elizabeth Kolbert
This information about Thunder & Lightning was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lauren Redniss is the author of Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies and Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout, a finalist for the National Book Award. She teaches at Parsons the New School for Design.
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