Disaster Trends
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton, and this is the Weather Notebook.

With so much in way of headlined catastrophic weather around the country, you'd think we'd be used to it by now. Not so, according to commentator David Laskin, who says readers and movie goers are wilder than they've ever been about meteorological disasters.

I trace this fad back to the 1968 publication of David McCullough's bestseller The Johnstown Flood. But it was in 1997 that the public really got swept away by two monster disaster blockbusters - Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm about a combination nor-easter-hurricane that swallowed up a New England fishing boat and its crew, and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, about a high profile Everest attempt doomed by horrific weather. Since then, the disaster hit parade has rolled on with Isaac's Storm which recreates the devastating Galveston hurricane of 1900, The Hungry Ocean in which swordfish boat captain Linda Greenlaw recounts her own brush with the perfect storm, and most recently the movie version of that boffo box office blow.

Is this just a passing fad, a kind of literary hoola hoop, or does our appetite for weather disaster stories reveal something fundamental about our national psyche? Says Erik Larson, author of Isaac's Storm, "Big storms bring out big powerful feelings - big passions, big fears, both of which are manifestly missing in the age of the Internet. Disaster books are a reaction to a world in which everything is so controlled and miniaturized."

Larson, however, believes that the disaster wave has crested, which raises the interesting question: what's next?

Commentator David Laskin lives in Seattle, Washington. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory. It is supported by the National Science Foundation.