The Elements Rage: The Extremes of Natural Violence

Editorial Review - Kirkus ReviewsIf the two photographs we've seen are an index, this volume should be a triumph of illustrations over text. Lane has doubled the contents of the 1945 edition of his study and added some amazingly good pictures. His subject is a survey of natural disasters, hurricanes, tornadoes, waterspouts, hail, avalanches, lightning, floods, meteoroids, earthquakes and volcanoes. His massive study is bolstered by voluminous appendices, which help him score in the reference department if not the literary. Lane covers so much ground, so many eruptions of nature over the centuries, that he seldom settles down to any single event in depth. To be sure, Lane has captured some great moments filled with incredible fury and curious facts. Thus, those meteorites we sometimes see above us for a half second on a dark night, their trails blazing for miles, are seldom larger than a grain of rice. Spectacularly in 1833, the sky turned into a circus when a meteor swarm was carried into the earth's path and some 35,000 falling stars fell per hour. (Today, a meteorite explosion could be misinterpreted as a nuclear attack.) The imaginative reader will find himself shrinking away from giant hailstones or hiding from the wind.