Nature

Everyone knows what they say about weather in New England: If you don't like it, wait a minute, right? But some weather is more destructive than others, and some storms can last long enough to make you remember their fury more than a hundred years later. People who live in the Northeast know about blizzards and nor'easters, hurricanes, ice showers, tornado winds, and flood-producing rains. In Great New England Storms of the 20th Century, the Boston Globe chronicles an era that encompasses many of the most devastating weather events on record, including the blizzard of 1978, the perfect storm of 1991, tornadoes in 1953, floods in 1936, gales in 1905, and a 1938 hurricane that still has no equal. And this book doesn't just bring the historical facts; it offers the faces and personal stories behind each disaster, along with weather data and graphics, trivia, and the lighter side of the news. Produced by the respected staff of the Boston Globe, each chapter presents compelling writing and dramatic photographs culled from an unrivaled regional archive of material, all of which add up to the most complete and captivating portrait of 20th-century New England storm history ever published.

"[This] is a book of great richness, beauty and power and thus very difficult to do justice to in a brief review. . . . The violence is sometimes unbearable, the language rarely less than superb. Dillard's description of the moth's death makes Virginia Woolf's go dim and Edwardian. . . . Nature seen so clear and hard that the eyes tear. . . . A rare and precious book." -- Frederick Buechner, New York Times Book Review

From Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Dillard, a book about the grace, beauty, and terror of the natural world.

In the mid 1970s, Annie Dillard spent two years on an island in Puget Sound in a room with a solitary window, a cat, and a spider for company, asking herself questions about memory, time, sacrifice, reality, death, and God. Holy the Firm, the diary-like collection of her thoughts, feelings, and ruminations during this time, is a lyrical gift to any reader who have ever wondered how best to live with grace and wonder in the natural world.