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THE FORGOTTEN STORM: THE GREAT TRI-STATE TORNADO OF 1925
Wallace Akin, 2002, 173 pp., $19.95, hardbound, The Lyons Press, ISBN 1-58574-607-X
This rather short, 14-chapter book documents the path of North America's deadliest tornado as it crossed Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. The first chapter sets the meteorological stage. Chapters 2-13 each document a portion of the path. Chapter 14 and 15 wrap up the story and provide a bit of information about other deadly tornadoes. The choice of title is certainly odd. This event is among the least-forgotten storms in the written history of this country.
Wallace Akin was just two years old when he personally experienced the tornado at Murphysboro, Illinois. In his stories of survival, he uses an easy-to-read style and includes local color, family stories, and historical background about the region. They add a nice touch for the general reader. A personal passion does shine through in places. The book also borrows heavily from other meteorological texts, especially Wilson and Changnon (1971). Inserts covering such phenomena as downbursts, supercells, and hail are appropriately placed and will be helpful to a nonmeteorologist. The Forgotten Storm might have worked as a good meteorological text for beginners. However, in this reviewer's opinion, the author made one unfortunate decision. He did not have the text proofread by a meteorologist with tornado research experience. This resulted in a book with so many misstatements and errors that it ruins its potential as a useful public education tool. There are thousands of potential reviewers in this country who could have told Akin that the Flint, Michigan, tornado of 1953 was the last one to kill 100 or more people, not the West Virginia tornado of 1944. The manuscript improvements from that proof reading (none were mentioned in the acknowledgments) would have greatly enhanced the credibility of the book. It would also have changed the nature of this review, which must focus on some of those inaccuracies.
Despite the errors and overstatements, this book becomes part of a trilogy of published Tri-State works, each with a different emphasis. It joins the meteorological research by Wilson and Changnon (1971) and the Tri-State interviews in the unfortunately out-ofprint book by Peter Felknor (1992). However, The Forgotten Storm is not a rigorously researched...