| The Olympic Games: Athens 1896-Sydney 2000
by Dorling Kindersley
The Olympic Games demand more from viewers than just turning on the
TV. Like the athletes themselves, we spectators need to do our
training. We need to know the history, the events, the competitors,
and the records. The more up to speed we are on them, the better shape
we're in to appreciate the hoopla.
Newly updated for the gathering in Sydney, The Olympic Games is a
coffee table-sized, gold medal effort that has a complete training
facility between its covers. Letting its tremendous cache of recent
and vintage photos perform the heavy lifting, it looks both forward
and back, running the Olympian gamut from the grand and glorious to
the trivial and arcane. Sydney is previewed in detail with a full
schedule and a look at the venues and some of the athletes worth
keying on, but The Olympic Games's real strength is its focus on the
Games' rich past and enduring legacy.
Each Olympics--summer and winter--since the 1896 revival comes with an
incisive recap of the major events and personalities that defined it,
followed by several wonderful pages of portraits and action shots with
remarkably informative captions. The archival pictures are
particularly priceless. They give faces to names and accomplishments
that deserve remembering. Even better, the evolution in their very
style conveys just how much so many of the sports have changed from
lonely pursuits of personal excellence to international arenas for
instant stardom. The book's last 100 pages are devoted to results and
statistics--every gold, silver, and bronze medalist gets his or her
due, and for those utterly immersed in Olympic trivia, the lighter of
each Olympic torch is noted as well.
--Jeff Silverman
Inside the Hurricane:
Face to Face With Nature's Deadliest Storms
by Pete Davies
In October 1998, a tropical wave (a.k.a. "seedling
disturbance") churned up in the waters off West Africa, where the
hot air masses of the Sahara and the tropics meet the cold wall of the
Atlantic Ocean. This "bundle of disarranged weather," in
Pete Davies's memorable phrase, gathered strength as it passed across
the ocean, emerging days later as the catastrophic Hurricane Mitch,
which devastated huge sections of the Caribbean and Central America
and killed thousands of people.
Mitch fascinated storm-chasing meteorologists, who, in the main,
failed to predict the storm's intensity and to track it accurately.
They failed for good reason, Davies suggests: these scientific heroes,
the kind of men and women who think nothing of flying through the
eyewall of great storms to see what's inside, catalogue their findings
through research programs that, Davies writes, are woefully
underfunded and understaffed. The United States sends up only two sets
of weather balloons a day, many other hurricane-prone countries lack
the resources to send up any balloons at all, and a key satellite
failed during the storm.
Despite the destruction that Mitch wrought, and despite a mountain
of evidence that shows that storms are becoming ever more severe in
their intensity as a result of global warming, "the world's
upper-air network is being steadily degraded" as governments seek
to cut their budgets. All of which, Davies suggests, means that
although doomsday storms may become commonplace, our ability to
foresee them and guess at their landfalls is an iffy matter at best,
all for want of a few dollars more. "This is a prospect," he
writes, "that good and credible science lays before us--good
science done by brave men on a puny budget--and it's a prospect that
the people of Honduras already understand far too well."
Inside the Hurricane is an engaging introduction to
the minutiae of storm-watching and an impassioned argument that we
need to keep a closer eye on the sky.
--Gregory McNamee
Related
title:
Hurricane Hugo: Puerto Rico, the
U.S. Virgin Islands, and South Carolina: September 17-22, 1989
(Natural Disasters Studies, Vol 6)
by Joseph
H. Golden (Editor), Riley
M. Chung (Editor), Earl
J. Baker (Editor)
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