A stellar review!

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I love working for the nation's leading expert on extreme weather and one exciting thing I got to do recently was to tag along with Mike while storm chasing last Friday the 13th. (Jealous?) Mike is one of the early storm chasers along with being one of the creators of the modern storm warning system. If you can't be there in person, you can read Mike's book WARNINGS The True Story of How Science Tamed the Weather (Greenleaf 2010)

 Mary A. Safer offered the following review.   Click here to read the entire review.One of the finest weather books I've read in quite a while!, April 16, 2012
By 
Mary A. Shafer "Author • Speaker • Educator" (Bucks County, Pennsylvania USA)


I got this book as an Easter gift and immediately began devouring it. I was instantly sorry I hadn't bought it sooner...

I'm a very busy person with little time to read, but I MADE time as I got into Warnings, and buzzed through it in four days of brief reading periods. Not only is this book about a really cool subject -- our modern-day severe storm warning system and how it almost didn't happen -- but it's written very engagingly with nary a slow spot in the entire book. As an author myself, I know how truly difficult it is to keep up such a pace without losing steam, but Mike Smith does a bang-up job all the way through...


Mary goes on to say that she would love to read an update of the record storms from last year and she is not alone.


I'd love to read an updated edition that includes reference to last spring's horrific tornado outbreak, and indeed to the one we just experienced last weekend. The science of severe weather forecasting and the related warning system continues to evolve, and I look forward to evolving coverage of it, especially if it's as engagingly presented as the material in Warnings!




The biggest news of 2011 wasn't the economy, health care, gas prices or politics. The biggest news was the weather.

  • Record tornadoes through out the United States.
  • Deadliest tornado season in over 50 years.
  • Record Floods in the Northeast.
  • Billions of dollars of lost revenue due to drought and wildfires in the Southwest.
  • Unprecedented flood levels in the Midwest along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers

For those of you like Mary who would like to read more, your wait is almost over. Mike's new book When the Sirens Were Silent (Mennonite Press 2012) is coming out May 1, 2012. Mike weaves his passion for weather along with his superb talent for storytelling into what really happened last year in the Joplin tornado that claimed 161 lives. Mike has included information to protect your home, school and workplace inside the book so that this tragic event never happens again.

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