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"David Laskin deploys
historical fact of the finest grain to tell the story of a monstrous blizzard
that caught the settlers of the Great Plains utterly by surprise... This is a
book best read with a fire roaring in the hearth and a blanket and box of
tissues near at hand." -- Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City
"Heartbreaking... This account of the 1888 blizzard reads like a thriller." -- Entertainment Weekly
The
gripping true story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newly
arrived settlers and cast a shadow on the promise of the American frontier.
January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably
warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild
that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon,
without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air
was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force
winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the
center of the continent.
By the next morning, some five hundred people
lay dead on the drifted prairie, many of them children who had perished on
their way home from country schools. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of
the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh
environment. Recent immigrants from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and the Ukraine
learned that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving
place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled.
With the storm as its dramatic, heartbreaking
focal point, The Children's Blizzard captures
this pivotal moment in American history by tracing the stories of five families
who were forever changed that day. David Laskin has produced a masterful
portrait of a tragic crucible in the settlement of the American heartland.
The P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights
into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
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