Book Review: A Furious Sky by Eric Jay Dolin
Ideological Bias Leaves Hint Of Bitter Aftertaste, But Narrative Does Return To Form To Save Overall Taste And Complexity. This is a book that is exactly what it says it is - a 500 ish year history of the death and destruction caused by the hurricanes and similar storms that have affected the land now known as America. Beginning from Columbus' sailings and going through the 2017 Hurricane Season, we get a lot of blow by blow stories of some of the most legendary hurricanes in that period... and a lot of storms even those generally familiar with hurricane history may not be as familiar with. We also get a lot of details about each storm that in some cases even those generally familiar with that specific storm may not have been aware of. So yes, in that the tales of strong hurricanes tend to be somewhat similar, this book does in fact get a touch repetitive in overall feel... *specifically because* so many hurricanes follow such a similar path in their interactions with humans.
Dolin does a phenomenal job though with his explorations and explanations of the overall history of meteorology and forecasting as they specifically relate to hurricanes, from the earliest "red sky in the morning" levels all the way into the satellite age and the current National Hurricane Center cones. It is, however, specifically in this part of the narrative - and in the epilogue and perhaps a touch of the penultimate chapter as well in particular - where Dolin's ideological bent shines through enough to give some readers pause - and other readers reason to get a dopamine hit from confirmation bias. Even here though, Dolin does eventually come back to his central thesis regarding forecasting: We just don't have enough data and enough computing power. Period. Thus, we can only use best guesses and probabilities based on observed past data... which isn't always as useful as we'd like. Hell, Dolin at one point gets even more specific about the issue than even Steven Koonin's Unsettled (published in April 2021, just months after the August 2020 publication of this book) does in showing exactly how even "minor" rounding errors in computational models can rapidly produce *dramatically* different results in the forecasts over as little as even three days.
I have direct experience with a trio of the storms in the "Rogue's Gallery" chapter near the end - Katrina (where I was living in North Ga but attended a church that *immediately* began loading horse trailers full of supplies and had them running for an entire week down to a church we had a contact with in southern Mississippi), Irma (where I had just moved to Jacksonville, Florida barely a month before Irma marched up the Florida peninsula (fortunately my area of Jacksonville, near the coast yet also well inland from it, was largely spared - other areas of town, not so much)), and Dorian (where I fled from the opening weekend of Walt Disney World's Hollywood Studios' Galaxy's Edge in order to beat the storm back to Jacksonville). In the storms that I directly lived through (Irma and Dorian in particular), Dolin's reporting rings true to what I remember of these storms. Even his reporting of Andrew (when I was just nine years old) and Katrina rings true to the general reporting and studying of those storms I've done myself over the years, though even here Dolin includes specific stories and information about these storms even I had not previously known.
Overall a very informative book for the history that it does cover but one that could perhaps be updated from time to time with more recent developments.
Very much recommended.
This review of A Furious Sky by Eric Jay Dolin was originally written on June 28, 2026.
