Next week is Severe Weather Week! To celebrate, I thought I’d share some of my favorite recent weather finds. To kick us off, you can celebrate Severe Weather Awareness Day at Trevecca on Saturday, Feb 24. Then follow up that fun with nightly classes on your favorite topics, brought to you by our Nashville meteorologists with the National Weather Service. To pregame, check out these titles below!

My grandfather was a farmer for a good portion of his life. Spending all that time outside taught him how to read the weather. In fact, in his prime, he could always tell when it was going to rain, give or take 15 minutes. I inherited a little bit of his gift and then added my own weather curiosity. This book was an excellent guide to all the natural phenomenon that occur to guide us through the day or week, weather-wise. My first encounter with Gooley was with his book, The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs. This was an enjoyable book that talked about how nature tells us things, if only we will look in the right places. It goes outside of weather, which I wasn’t the most excited about, so when I saw that Gooley had written another book all about my favorite subject, I was in. My only complaint is that Gooley is actually from the UK, so most of his stories reflect their weather patterns. While he has a brief section about storms and tornadoes, they pale in comparison to the real ones. We need to get Goodley over here and take him storm chasing to learn about the real thing. The first book you’ll have to ILL to read, but NPL has this latest one for you to check out.

This book is not what I thought it was going to be about. To me parrot and igloo means tropics and poles - the two most affected places by climate change. But in this case, Lipsky focuses on the people who for decades have denied that climate change exists and why they do that. At one point, he even compares climate change to cigarette smoking. This is not the book I expected, but I still found it fascinating. Lipsky starts out with the inventors like Edison and Tesla who helped shape our world. Then he moves on to how climate change was first discovered and then repeatedly denied. There’s a lot of info here, but it held my attention. Definitely worth the time if you are curious.

This is an interesting book, but it is really more weather adjacent. Leventhall spent his career at Fox News covering all kinds of wars, terror attacks, and other breaking news. My favorite section was the part on hurricanes. Rick wasn’t always able to be in the eye of the hurricane, but when he was it sounded terrifying. The rest of the sections were also captivating - discussing 9/11 when he was just a block away as the towers collapsed or being at the Daytona 500 on the day that Dale Earnhardt died. I’m not the biggest fan of partisan news, but honestly that only played a small part here. Overall, his stories are worth the read. 
 

Alright friends, let get this Severe Weather Week party started!

Happy storming (the castle)...

:) Amanda