This is the story of the perfect storm system, El Niño, which in its 1997–1998 incarnation created aberrant weather conditions across the world, often with devastating results. Nash, a former science correspondent for Time
magazine, does not have an easy narrative structure (the progress of a storm) and obvious characters (those caught in that storm), as other books on bad weather do. She compensates by crisscrossing the stories of the scientists who have studied the incredibly complex system with those who have been affected. The book begins with a California couple waiting for torrential rains brought on by El Niño to wash away a nearby hill and carry the debris into their own house. Readers get a fascinating glimpse of the Peruvian fisherman who first noticed the sign that heralds El Niño: the periodic disappearance of a normally bounteous catch. Nash observes Africa's Rift Valley and the American Southwest, where El Niño encouraged terrible outbreaks of fever. Few places escape unscathed by the system. In between tragedies, the author interviews several key researchers: Gilbert Thomas Walker, a British mathematician, who in India began connecting the various effects of El Niño into one spectacular system; glaciologist Lonnie Thompson, who studies ice caps in the Peruvian mountains; and Ants Leetmaa, who first blew the whistle on El Niño, correctly predicting the most recent event despite much public doubt (he was even teased by NBC weatherman Al Roker on Larry King Live). Nash does a good job holding such disparate material together and bringing alive such an abstract, albeit dynamic, system. (Mar. 12)
