eruption book review

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(as of Dec 26, 2024 23:09:15 UTC - Details)

A riveting history of the Mount St. Helens eruption that will "long stand as a classic of descriptive narrative" (Simon Winchester).

For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, sightseers, and nearby residents listened anxiously to rumblings in Mount St. Helens, part of the chain of western volcanoes fueled by the 700-mile-long Cascadia fault. Still, no one was prepared when an immense eruption took the top off of the mountain and laid waste to hundreds of square miles of verdant forests in southwestern Washington State. The eruption was one of the largest in human history, deposited ash in eleven U.S. states and five Canadian providences, and caused more than one billion dollars in damage. It killed fifty-seven people, some as far as thirteen miles away from the volcano’s summit.

Shedding new light on the cataclysm, author Steve Olson interweaves the history and science behind this event with page-turning accounts of what happened to those who lived and those who died.

Powerful economic and historical forces influenced the fates of those around the volcano that sunny Sunday morning, including the construction of the nation’s railroads, the harvest of a continent’s vast forests, and the protection of America’s treasured public lands. The eruption of Mount St. Helens revealed how the past is constantly present in the lives of us all. At the same time, it transformed volcanic science, the study of environmental resilience, and, ultimately, our perceptions of what it will take to survive on an increasingly dangerous planet.

Rich with vivid personal stories of lumber tycoons, loggers, volcanologists, and conservationists, Eruption delivers a spellbinding narrative built from the testimonies of those closest to the disaster, and an epic tale of our fraught relationship with the natural world.

8 pages of illustrations; 8 maps

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (March 7, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393353583
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393353587
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
Reviewer: Linda Yoder
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Gripping
Review: The eruption was felt nationally, and though I lived in the Midwest at the time, I was fascinated and horrified at the same time. I now live I the Pacific Northwest and have driven past Mount St. Helens any number of times and marvel at its presence. This is a terrific, detail-rich book with personal stories that flesh out the magnitude of the events of 1980.

Reviewer: Charles D. Burton
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Nature, Politics And People
Review: A very clear account of the way this eruption affected the immediate area, and especially some of the unfortunate victims, as well as number of survivors. It personifies the story nicely in that way. It also shows how political machinations involving the lumbering industry, especially the Weyerhaeuser Company, of which it gives a short and interesting history, affected the death toll for better or worse. Could such a disaster happen again? Yes, of course. Mother Nature is far from totally predictable. What has been learned from this disaster, though, might at least help to reduce the toll. A very good read.

Reviewer: Superior.Shores
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Captivating
Review: While we live almost 1,000 miles from St. Helen’s we remember the news reports with an almost calmness to them. Yes, ash did fall here, but not to the extent closer to the eruption.What Olson does is take the reader into the lives of the people, alive and dead, who were so affected by St. Helen’s. This book literally opened my eyes.

Reviewer: Chuck
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Lace up your hiking boots, and get ready for a journey that'll leave you breathless!
Review: If you're looking for a book that'll take you on an epic journey through the explosive world of volcanoes, then "Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens" is the perfect pick! This page-turner takes you on a thrilling trip back in time to the moment Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, and shows you the massive impact it had on the people and the world around it.I was blown away by the level of detail in this book. It covers everything from the science behind the eruption to the stories of the brave souls who lived through it. This book isn't just about the eruption itself, it's about the aftermath, the lessons learned, and how it changed the way we look at natural disasters. It's a true testament to the power of nature, and the bravery of the human spirit.One of my favorite quotes from the book is, "Nature has no mercy, and we must always be prepared for the unexpected." This quote really resonated with me because it's a reminder that we are never truly in control, and that we must always be ready for whatever nature throws our way.Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who loves a good adventure, or anyone who wants to learn more about the world around them. Whether you're a science buff, a history buff, or just looking for a thrilling read, this book is the perfect choice.

Reviewer: margie
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Revisiting the eruption
Review: This book brought back memories of the eruption and the terrible sadness of losing Dave Johnston. I'm grateful to the author for speaking of him in depth and honoring his work. Although the eruption was a chance in a lifetime for a geologist to witness, my dad Rocky Crandell was devastated by Dave's death. We had lost my brother to an accident 15 years earlier and Dad felt it deeply. The author did a good job of setting the scene for the eruption, but I got bored with the extensive Weyerhaeuser history and barely skimmed those chapters. I would have loved to have seen more information on Don Mullineaux and Rocky and their groundbreaking extensive work on Mt. Rainer which led them to Mt. St. Helens. I do believe what was said about them was accurate, to the best of my memory. The concluding chapter was excellent.

Reviewer: Marla Burke
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Interesting but takes a while to get to it
Review: This gets 3 stars because I did learn about the politics and the victims of the Mt. St. Helen's explosion.To get there, I had to slog through a biography of Goerge Weyerhaeuser so long I wondered if this was just another way to advertise Weyerhaeuser. It was unnecessaryly long despite the concessions his wealth and business received that impacted the overall fatality rate.It jumped about a bit before it actually began to build a pace. While the historical information was interesting and some could support the theme, I'm still not clear why it was necessary to stick a paragragh about how this mountain, perceived as female by Native Americans, had become "...disfigured, as if an evil gray liquid had leaked from its tip, and on the north side of the mountain, a strange disfiguration had appered, a malignancy on the once-perfect cone."This paragragh was inserted between how the mountain got its name and what the loggers in the area were thinking about at the time just preceeding the explosion. And was the only passage about Native American history of any substance throughout the book. That paragraph seems more mysoginistic than having any other purpose in it's placement in the narrative. Good imagry of a cancerous breast but it seems to just be dropped there because he really liked it and couldn't find anyplace else to put it.This book had the unfortunate luck to follow my reading ot Al Roker's The Storm of the Century and, of course, Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm.It must be difficult to figure out what goes and what stays when writing on natural disasters but Eruption was far too scattered in the beginning and, while it tried near the end to impart some measure of the victim's experience and outcomes, it fell short of the tightness and emotional impact of the other two books.

Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Encompassing story of eruption
Review: Loved the details and humanization of the story', Encompassing the impact on the scientific. Ecological . sociological and human systems

Reviewer: Americanewfie
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I've watched about every Mt St Helens documentary out there but to read this book was infinitely better!! Nice work!!

Reviewer: Leonie Bell
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Incredibly researched book creates a complete picture of the events leading up to the eruption and its aftermath. We get to know the people who died, the survivors, scientists, businessmen and politicians involved. Olson sensitively honours the memory of those who died and proves conclusively that they were not there illegally as politicians falsely claimed. He dammingly shows how many of the poor decisions regarding unrestricted access to dangerous areas were scientifically unsound, but instead were politically and commercially oriented, and led to deaths. A very readable book. I look forward to reading more by this author.

Reviewer: Charlotte Davis
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: "Eruption" was not quite what I'd expected when I ordered the book, as I am far more interested in the geophysical aspects of eruptions and earthquakes than in anything else, but the narratives of those people who had experienced this cataclysm were spell-binding, even though - as to be expected - horrific in places. This book very well underlines the vulnerability of our infrastructure, and, of course, of people themselves in the face of a volcanic event. It remains to be hoped that politicians who often express disbelief about the (grossly insufficient!) funds expended for research on volcanoes and earthquakes read this book and realize that this is funding that has to be increased, not cut even further.

Reviewer: Deb C
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Clear and easy to read description of the Mount St Helens eruption.

Reviewer: Boris Behncke
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: After Frank Parchman's "Echoes of Fury: The 1980 Eruption of Mount St. Helens and the Lives It Changed Forever" (2005) and Richard Waitt's "In the Path of Destruction: Eyewitness Chronicles of Mount St. Helens" (2015), there is now a third recent book that promises to reveal new details about the catastrophic 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens. As a matter of fact, it is a very pleasant, riveting read, and amazingly the author has succeeded in avoiding a simple repetition in new words of facts and details already revealed in the previous two books. Instead, his story threads a broad arc through time and space, constructing the historical human framework in which the volcanic crisis developed. Whereas "Echoes of Fury" is much focused on the persons, the actors and victims in the events of 1980, and "Path of Destruction" overwhelms with details about all that was observed during those events, Olson's "Eruption" brings us back to the people that established a huge timbering industry in the St Helens area, and the role this played during the prelude to the eruption and the eruption itself in 1980. For this alone, it does indeed present a story that touches different aspects than those dealt with in the other two books. Obviously, the volcanic events form the core of the story, but the broader context is at least as prominently featured. In one respect, "Eruption" repeats, with emphasis, one message also brought out clear and loud in "Echoes of Fury" and "Path of Destruction" - the fact that nearly all the victims, dead or survivors, were NOT in the "forbidden" area, they were NOT the sensation seekers recklessly risking their lives they were declared to be by politicians (including then President of the United States, Jimmy Carter) in the wake of the disaster. This message cannot be told often enough, because the notion of these victims being guilty of their own fate is still widely anchored in public conscience, both in America and elsewhere.