Reviews

ForeWord This Week by Whitney Hallberg, Managing Editor "Hurricanes" by Jack Williams and Stephen Leatherman (978-0-7603-2992-4) explores "Earth's fiercest storms" with fifty color photos and descriptions of hurricane behavior. Winds must reach 74 miles per hour in order for a storm to be considered a hurricane, but they regularly reach speeds greater than 100 miles per hour and create 50-foot waves. The book looks at U.S Air Force Reserve pilots who fly into hurricanes to provide wind data to forecasters. "On a typical nine- or ten-hour flight, an airplane will make maybe a half dozen trips all of the way across a storm, following a different path each time," the authors write. "Each trip goes through the turbulent eye-wall and the calm eye." Williams and Leatherman explain that a hurricane's winds "could affect more than 200 miles of coastline," and that the names of the storms come from a National Hurricane Center-approved list of men's and women's names in French, English, and Spanish that is created each year. The photographs are especially fascinating, including one taken from the eye of Katrina before she hit, and several taken from space. A satellite image of Fran, which hit North Carolina, shows the winds that affected the weather in New England and the Midwest, even causing flooding in Ohio.