Divine Wind: jacket and interior: Oxford University Press
This hurricane book combined science, history and literature together to give a broader picture of what hurricanes are, when they’ve occurred,
and how they’ve been written and illustrated throughout recorded history. Charts were coordinated with the author and small details notating the power
of hurricanes were included: ex: warped and blurred chapter titles, directional arrows and symbols. Read a review of the book below.
> back to jackets and interiors >> see closeup details of Divine Wind
Review: PLAIN DEALER (Cleveland)

NONFICTION Divine Wind By Kerry Emanuel. Oxford University Press, 285 pp., $45.
A sobering time for an informative book about hurricanes
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Hurricane Katrina has saturated us with news. Kerry Emanuel has created a book equal to our search for context.
"Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes" is physically beautiful, with 111 color illustrations that capitalize on enhanced satellite photography and the paintings of Winslow Homer. The text is just as generous, pulling from last year's computer simulations, historical records and the testimony of poets.
Organized into 32 taut chapters, the book arrives in Chapter 29 at three scenarios that fuel the nightmares of forecasters. No. 2 is New Orleans, below sea level and vulnerable as a sand castle. "A strong storm surge coupled with heavy rain could overwhelm the pumps and submerge most of the residences and one-story buildings," Kerry writes.
The only piece that this MIT professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary science leaves out - the book was published Sept. 1 - is the likelihood of a loose barge crashing into the levy. But the uncanny prescience of this book is almost an aside. "Divine Wind" takes its title from the Japanese "Kamikaze." From its opening sentence, "Were it not for two typhoons, Japan might be part of China today," the reader embarks on an education most of us missed in school. It turns out that the course of human history has been cut by hurricanes, the deadliest of all natural phenomena. Twice, typhoons defeated Mongol warriors poised to overrun Japan from the Korean peninsula. In the second invasion in 1279, the storm drowned and scattered a force consisting of 100,000 men.
No wonder the Japanese considered the winds divine. Five hundred years later, the American revolutionaries got a handy assist from hurricanes wiping out part of the British navy. And in the same neighborhood as the Mongols, U.S. Admiral William "Bull" Halsey lost 790 sailors out of 831 aboard three warships in 1944 as he steered into a typhoon that he underestimated.
Heat convection and the physics of air-sea interactions are vital sections of this book. The author is unafraid of the homely bathtub analogy in explaining the terrible, beautiful architecture of the storm. Cutaway models and color graphs help the differential equations make sense, even for readers who would not attempt to solve them.
In clear, clean prose, Emanuel leavens his book with detail. When the San Felipe Hurricane brought 150 mph winds across Puerto Rico in 1928, "Tin roofs, popular at the time, became horrible airborne instruments of decapitation." The storm later made landfall in Florida and some of the 2,400 day laborers killed that day died because they shared treetops with water moccasins. This horror entered literature through Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God." Emanuel excerpts a long, satisfying passage from her book.
For his part, the author is less worried about global warming than the explosion of coastal building in hurricane corridors. The Mayans, he points out twice, knew better. They built inland. Connoisseurs of natural disasters will devour "Divine Wind," but I hope it finds its way into numerous school libraries, too. The author's gifts as a science teacher combine with a cultivated taste in folklore, literature and art. "Divine Wind" carries across the infamous two-culture gap, allowing the humanities and sciences to enhance each other. Emily Dickinson clearly intuited some basic science in her poem, "I Think the Root of Wind is Water." In 1609, the British captain William Stachey was caught aboard ship in a hurricane, writing: "It could not be said to rain; the waters like whole rivers did flood the air." The Stachey manuscript found its way to London, becoming a source for Shakespeare's play "The Tempest."
Emanuel's work, inspired by these terrible storms, reaches a different, and thrilling, level of art.
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Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes
By Kerry Emanuel
ISBN 0-19-5149416; $45.00
Publication Date: September 2005