Literary Hub, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and the anthology Elementals: Volume IV. Fire forthcoming in 2024 from The Center for Humans and Nature. She received a 2023 Whiting Award in Creative Nonfiction, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship, and residencies at the Banff Centre, Millay Colony, MacDowell Colony (waitlisted), Hedgebrook, and Ragdale. Her memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary is out now from Row House Publishing in 2024 and her novel All the Water in the World is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in early 2025.
At Lit Hub Caffall tagged ten books on maritime disasters and ecocollapse, including:
Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in HistoryRead about the other entries on the list.
Isaac’s Storm is a nonfiction recounting of the Galveston hurricane of 1900, which killed twelve thousand people, the worst weather disaster in American history. I bought the bestseller on impulse in a Midway Airport bookshop on my wayfrom Chicago to Boston to care for my father as he was dying from the kidney disease we share. I read it through on the plane, then read it again for weeks at his bedside.
It is a town-wreck, a hurricane book, but it also features ships caught in the storm at sea, ships wrecking into a city, and the heartbreaking wreck of the raft made to escape a flooding home. It conveys the science of weather, the history weather prediction, and the American politics that made the disaster worse.
It presents a fully realized world within the creative nonfiction, with recreated conversations, the heat of the Gulf Coast, the smell of fresh sawn wood, the sound of the Bavarian beer hall, the heartbreaking feeling of losing the grip of the hand of your beloved underwater.
Isaac’s Storm is a book that made a difference to Brian Williams.
--Marshal Zeringue
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