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Letter from Terry Brazier, Senior Publicist, Harper Collins

Imagine the cruel irony of crossing the ocean, enduring hardships, and braving dangers to start a new life in America only to be crushed on an unseasonably mild day by the fiercest blizzard ever to hit the Great Plains.   In THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD (Harper Perennial; October 11, 2005; $13.95; ISBN: 0-06-052076-0), David Laskin tells the story of this brutally savage, sudden snowstorm that occurred on January 12, 1888 from the perspective of immigrant families who lived through it and lost—sons, daughters, parents, homes, and their faith in the salvation of the new world.  A respected chronicler of both American history and extreme weather, Laskin draws on a storehouse of unpublished materials, including searing eyewitness accounts from German and Scandinavian settlers who rarely put their feelings down on paper, to provide a gripping, intimate portrait of an epic tragedy.

 Known as “The School Children’s Blizzard” because so many of the victims were children on their way home from school, this natural disaster claimed an estimated 500 lives.  Beyond the tragedy of its death toll, the blizzard became a watershed for settlers of the Nebraska, Dakota, and Minnesota prairie, the event that separated the promise of before from the unsettling uncertainty of after.  “To understand why and how the deadliest Midwestern blizzard happened the way it did is to understand something essential about the history of the American prairie—indeed about the history of America itself,” Laskin asserts.

 THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD provides an hour-by-hour account of the development of this formidable storm and an eye-opening insider’s view of the science, politics and hubris of weather prediction in 1888.  Along the way, Laskin traces the desperate attempt of a U.S. Signal Corps forecaster—Lieutenant Thomas M. Woodruff, a West Point graduate stationed at the fledgling forecast office in Saint Paul—to track the blizzard’s course and warn people of its approach.  He also celebrates the heroism of teachers who led their pupils to shelter—or to death—when the roofs blew off their one-room schoolhouses, and the sacrifice of fathers who died with their coats and arms wrapped around their sons.

 THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD is a testament to the courage of pioneering Americans and a timely reminder of the timeless fact of human vulnerability.  Also the author of Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals and Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather, David Laskin contributes regularly to The New York Times, Preservation and Smithsonian.  He lives in Seattle and will be touring the Great Plains states in January, close to the anniversary of the blizzard.                           

 Sincerely,

Tim Brazier

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