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Summary
Summary
It was the Perfect Storm. But instead of raging far out in the Atlantic, the Great Hurricane of 1938 left a wake of death and destruction across seven states. It battered J. P. Morgan's Long Island estate, wiped out beach communities from Watch Hill to Newport, flooded the Connecticut Valley, and flattened Vermont's prized maples.Traveling at record speeds, the storm raced up the Atlantic Coast, reaching New York and New England ahead of hurricane warnings and striking with such ferocity that seismographs in Alaska picked up the impact. Winds, clocked at 186 mph, stripped cars of their paint. Walls of water 50 feet high swept homes and entire families out to sea. Sandwiched between the Great Depression and World War II, the storm had a profound impact upon a generation. 'The day of the biggest wind has just passed,' the newswires read the next day, 'and a great part of the most picturesque America, as old as the Pilgrims, has gone beyond recall or replacement.' Drawing upon newspaper accounts, the personal testimony of survivors, forecasters, and archival footage, SUDDEN SEA recounts that terrifying day in gripping detail. Scotti describes the unlikely alignment of meteorological conditions that conspired to bring a tropical cyclone to the Northeast. A masterful storyteller, Scotti follows the trajectory of that awful wind-and recovers for posterity the lost stories of those whose lives, families, and communities were destroyed by the Hurricane of 1938.
Author Notes
R. A. Scotti, a former journalist for the Providence Journal-Bulletin and Newark Star-Ledger, is the author of five novels. A native Rhode Islander, Scotti grew up hearing stories of 1938, including one of an aunt who returned from work at the phone company in a rowboat and another about her grandmother's best friend, who stepped out onto the porch of her house and was never seen again. She summers at Narragansett Pier, Weekapaug, and Jamestown and lives the rest of the year in New York City
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Former journalist and mystery novelist Scotti successfully applies her skills in both genres to this detailed retelling of the 1938 hurricane that ripped across seven Northeastern states and killed 682 people, "the most destructive natural disaster in U.S. history-worse than the San Francisco earthquake, the Chicago fire, or any Mississippi flood." Although the enormity of the destruction has been written about before, Scotti focuses on "a few experiences that seem representative of many more" through interviews with hurricane survivors, their families and friends, as well as previously published recollections by survivors, including the late Katharine Hepburn. Scotti's detailed look at the general extent of the hurricane's destruction adds poignancy to individual stories, such as those of Joseph Matoes, who sees his children swept away from their school bus as they are battered by huge waves; Lillian Tetlow and Jack Kinney, two sweethearts who survive a storm that destroys Napatree, R.I., and who later marry; and Charles Pierce, a "green and unsure" junior forecaster for a woefully underprepared U.S. Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service) who stands against his experienced superiors as the only forecaster to recognize the danger of the hurricane. Scotti also skillfully presents the details of a hurricane, although she reminds us that "after decades of study and with all the technological tools of the trade... we still cannot predict a hurricane more than twenty-four hours in advance." (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Mystery writer Scotti (The Hammer's Eye, 1988, etc.) applies her suspense-building skills to the story of a murderous storm that capped a punishing decade. It's hard to go wrong with the raw material provided by the Great Hurricane of 1938. The narrative follows the storm as it made landfall in Florida, pushed up the coast, and raced from Cape Hatteras to Long Island in a mere seven hours. Where appropriate, Scotti adds brief background material on the nature of hurricanes, the quality of weather forecasting at the time, and the histories of the towns hardest hit, particularly in Rhode Island; she also compares the 1938 storm to others in the past. But she saves her most powerful writing for the hurricane itself, describing the storm watch and the havoc wrought when it reached land with the help of a wide sampling of firsthand accounts. "The scene around us in the attic was unbelievable," recalls a woman who was ten at the time. "The waves, at the level of the attic floor, beat unceasingly against the house, which trembled and shook." Scotti matches the wild images of the eyewitness accounts with her own flair for descriptive narrative: "The ocean banged on doors and windows . . . then it went upstairs into the bedrooms where families sought refuge, and chased them higher yet, into third floors and attics, onto rooftops, until there was no place to go but into the sea." Almost 700 people died, 433 of them in Rhode Island, where the storm surge buried Providence under 12 feet of water and where Scotti concentrates her story. With power and phone lines down, it was days before people understood the full extent of the devastation, which along the shoreline in particular was complete: "What they eye saw, the mind could not process and the heart refused to accept." A darkly intense portrait. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen, 4 maps) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: Gone with the Wind | p. 3 |
| 1 A Perfect Day | p. 7 |
| 2 The Way It Was | p. 25 |
| 3 A Shift in the Wind | p. 33 |
| 4 Hurricane Watch | p. 37 |
| 5 At Sea | p. 51 |
| 6 All Aboard | p. 61 |
| 7 A Bright Young Man | p. 71 |
| 8 Upside Down, Inside Out | p. 83 |
| 9 Battening the Hatches | p. 87 |
| 10 A One-Hundred-Year Storm | p. 93 |
| 11 How Do You Lose a Hurricane? | p. 99 |
| 12 The Long Island Express | p. 105 |
| 13 Crossing the Sound | p. 119 |
| 14 The Atlantic Ocean Bound Out of Bed | p. 125 |
| 15 The Dangerous Right Semicircle | p. 137 |
| 16 Providence | p. 161 |
| 17 The Tempest | p. 171 |
| 18 Cast Adrift | p. 189 |
| 19 All Quiet | p. 203 |
| 20 The Reckoning | p. 209 |
| 21 The Last of the Old New England Summers | p. 225 |
| Afterword | p. 235 |
| Appendix A Nickel for Your Story | p. 239 |
| Author's Acknowledgments | p. 245 |
| Sources and Chapter Notes | p. 247 |
| Selected Bibliography | p. 257 |
| Index | p. 265 |
