25. The Children's Blizzard, by David Laskin
"Thousands of impoverished Northern European immigrants were promised that the prairie offered "land, freedom, and hope." The disastrous blizzard of 1888 revealed that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled, and America’s heartland would never be the same."
This book tells the story of the "children's blizzard" of January 12, 1888, in which a mild day followed by a fast-moving, devastating storm blew through the Midwest, leaving hundreds dead, many of them children caught by the storm while they were at school. The book gives lots of details on the history and science of weather forecasting, the reasons the homesteaders had for moving to the plains, and what happens to a human body as hypothermia sets in (it isn't pretty).
I've tried to imagine such cold, but I really can't. I've never experienced any temperature colder than 13 degrees Fahrenheit, and that only once. I have gotten the impression that the 1880's were a time of harsh weather, judging from other books I've read like The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder and accounts of the blizzard in New York City in March of 1888, and newspaper accounts from my own town of a tornado that blew down the one and only church here in 1888 (which would not have been terribly notable in the Midwest, but this is California; after that, it was a good 120 years before the town experienced another such storm).
26. The Star Group, by Christopher Pike
Three guys and four girls meet a strange man who offers to give them secret knowledge, an inner journey that will transform them into powerful beings capable of bending the world to their wills. In the midst of this great transformation will emerge a bad seed with a will more evil than a devil.
This book was okay, but the story was kind of rushed, and the author didn't spend much time developing the characters.
