A human story hidden in a disaster account.

This is as close as I get to a thriller. And Mark Levine’s F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the 20th Century, a description of the freakish outbreak of storms in April 1974 has a definite ‘thriller’ feel to it. But with weather books such as this, there’s often the issue of exploitation hanging over writers (and readers) who are profit from or are entertained by other peoples’ astonishingly bad luck. Levine generally avoids that here; his account creates real, dignified people who are not entirely defined by the tornadoes that swept through their lives.

The April 1974 outbreak spawned hundreds of tornadoes over multiple states, killing hundreds and flattening more than a few communities. Levine examines the storms through the perspective of Limestone County, Alabama, which was struck twice within hours with deadly twisters. I especially like Levine’s opening scene with a young couple driving through the storm, a motif that reoccurs throughout the book. I should note that Levine, in addition to his journalism writings, is also a successful poet, a background that gives the language of F5 not only an immediacy but stark beauty as well.

Levine makes a few missteps, however. His efforts to cast the disaster in the light of Watergate woes, racial tensions and overall malaise slows the momentum and worse, runs against the notion of natural calamity appearing out of nowhere. Nixon may have been a conniving scoundrel, but the storms were not the result of a vengeful God smiting a morally bankrupt nation. Levine skips over most of the science behind the storms, and even that is mostly tied up in the work of Dr. Tetsuya (Ted) Fujita, at the time very much the public face of tornado research. It’s a humanity driven book, and that coupled with the strength of Levine’s writing, raises F5 a notch above most natural disaster books.