views. i never saw him favor his own position and never saw him misunderstand an argument. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. ..

montgomery, alabama will host the eighth annual alabama book festival. the event features 40 vendors and exhibitors, children's education malaria and has 45 authors and poets presentation scheduled for. on april 21st, maryland host the international day of the book which will highlight 100 local lawyers, live music and open mike sessions. and book fairs and festivals in very and add them to the list. and go to the east of.com/booktv or e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. up next lee sandlin recalled the beginnings of modern meteorology at the study of tornadoes throughout the american midwest. this is just under an hour. >> can you hear me? let me talk about this, a mutual

genesis. i don't know if you remember a few years ago there was something in iceland that disrupted air travel all through europe. sitting with a couple of friends we were talking about this because they were about to go to europe and one of them said this is the sort of thing, one of these -- one of the other people says i am from the midwest. all my anxiety is about tornadoes and i thought when i was growing up i had recurring nightmares about tornadoes and started asking around informally among my friends and discovered all of my friends were from the midwest who remembered that dream about tornadoes. my own childhood in the 1950s was a time when this was before

video footage of tornadoes, you can go to youtube and there's a whole genre of tornado footage where you can see hours after hours of tornado footage. you never heard about tornadoes in my child. you heard about them constantly but it was part of the texture of our lives then, we got tornado training in school, what to do if the tornado came to your house and we were told two things. even if the southwest corner, hide and people saying -- the other is open all the windows. those things are the worst

advice possible and they told us that, i think, because they were trying to give us a feeling that there was something to do. as far as people knew back then there was nothing. there's always the tendency certainly among american governments and schools and institutions to try to give people a feeling of power when there is nothing. this was part of growing up with tornadoes. those guys are interesting historically because they go back to the nineteenth century. the words modern scientific views of tornadoes were ideas around in the 1880s and some people still here today. even though they were nonsense and were always nonsense there was never any -- to be fair, there was a kind of scientific

notion they were relying on. opening the windows, people believed then in the nineteenth century that tornadoes were so extraordinarily destructive because the core of a tornado was a vacuum and if it passed over your house the air pressure inside your house would press outward and blow up your house so you opened the windows to equalize the air pressure. here again, that is total nonsense. tornadoes are not destructive because of that, they're destructive because of the winds surrounding the final which travel at 300 miles an hour and destroy just about anything. but there again, the ideas that sounded good and nobody knew anything better so it kept floating around and around and getting repeated and people just simply believe it. you hear things like that today.

people have this idea if you are driving in the open country and you see a tornado the best place to hide is under a freeway overpass and you see people doing that, you see videos of people doing that. that is the worst place on earth to hide from a tornado because the wind under an overpass, the overpass is a wind tunnel and speed the wind up. a tornado you might survive if you were out in a field, to hide under a bridge. the idea for instance of sap southeast corner of the basement came from an observation that most tornadoes move southwest to northeast showed the idea was if you went to your basement and you hid in that corner of the tornado would strike pull on and that might be more survivable than if you were in the

northeast corner. i have friends who are a little younger than i am who when they went to school were told hide in the northeast corner. not the southwest corner, the northeast but it doesn't make any difference what corner you hide in. actually the truth is almost everyone killed by tornadoes is killed by flying debris. the best thing to do is hide somewhere. that is the safest place you can go. you need a supporting wall in a building that might collapse. the idea that one part of the basement is a corner of the basement. i am--one of the things i found when i was researching my book is when people first came into the midwest, the know about tornadoes, native americans who live in prairies at the time

they were willing to give settlers, there was a time--they change their mind about that very quickly but when they were willing, they told people to build their settlement at the junction of the rivers because tornadoes don't block. that is false. the tradition of bat expert advice goes back hundreds of years. anybody who lived in st. louis, the two greatest rivers in america knows perfectly well tornadoes can cross rivers with no problems. you also hear they don't coming interior of cities, completely false. the tornado column, 50,000 feet high, the fact that it is in a building might be a thousand feet high, not going to make any difference. all of these ideas are floating

around because people need to have a feeling there's something they can do. there is another way governments, american governments traditionally make people feel better about tornadoes and that was to refuse to talk about them at all. this is another living we have forgotten, there was a period in america from the late nineteenth century until right after world war ii, the national weather service forbid its forecasters from predicting tornadoes. they forbid forecasters to even mention tornadoes. they said there were two reasons, one -- they didn't want to say. the first was they thought this is impossible to predict tornadoes, a prediction would cause a panic which might be worse than the actual tornado. the other reason was they were

under a lot of pressure from business interests and real-estate people and didn't the idea that it was dangerous. didn't want people to be worried about tornadoes. so they just refuse to talk about it and if they did talk about it, the iowa branch of the national weather service, the 1890s, said ireland gets only one tornado. >> you guys live here, there's more than one tornado a year in iowa. also said people shouldn't build storm sellers. one of the few genuinely practical steps you can take for tornadoes especially in farm country is shouldn't build storm sellers because the danger from catching a cold from the storm cellar, from the dirt, was worse

than any danger from any tornado. so all along through the history of america people have had this strange ambiguous relationship with tornadoes, denying them, being fascinated by them but pretending they weren't a big problem. and so that became when i started researching this book, the thing that fascinated me the most was how did people discover tornadoes and how did we learn to live with them? and the discovery was curious because when the european settlers came to america, they had no idea at all with tornadoes were. they had never seen any, they had never read about them, it was a completely new phenomenon which they thought was some kind of mysterious american storm.

one of the things that confuses the issue when you are trying to trace the history, has -- hard to believe that this is true. up until about 200 years ago, nobody thought systemically about the weather anywhere in the world. people, how long have people been on this planet? a couple million years? how long have people been giving off and lying on their backs looking at the sky and clouds. as far as we can figure out from the history of science wasn't until 1804 that anybody had the idea that clouds form any consistent patterns at all. if you are skeptical about this, some time in an art museum go and look at judge landscape art which is the most meticulous the beautiful renderings of the physical world you will ever see. the landscape is perfectly rendered and the clouds are just a mass of chaos in painting after painting. nobody had any idea that clouds

formed distinctive shapes. you would think it would be the most obvious thing in the world but no one thought of it. as far as i know the first person to think of it was moved howard, an amateur meteorologist in england who in 1804 gave a lecture which presented the idea there were nine kinds of clouds and he named them and all of the names he used are the names we use now. cirrus and cumulus and stratus. he invented those names out of nothing. they go back to ancient greece, based in scientific greek, but no one used those terms before. we tend to think they are as old as the hills but they went back to this one guy and we still use his term than he was the first person to suggest cloud the different shapes distinct shapes. in the same way, nobody believed storms took distinct form. nobody thought there was a difference between a tornado, a

hurricane, a gale, any of the terms we take for granted now, they did not see those as distinct forms. the result of that was if you read early accounts of the weather, they used terms like tornadoes and hurricanes and gail and cyclone and dust storm and thunderstorm completely indiscriminately. sometimes they will use them more than one term in the same sentence to describe the storm. i found an account of one of the worst tornadoes the never struck the midwest in 1805 in the history, written in 1850, the person writing the history very helpfully said this was a tornado of the hurricane type. he clearly had no idea, was just throwing words had it to see if any of them stock. when you are looking at the history of these things, you have to be aware that what you

are seeing is not what they were seeing because it is very hard unless you had the concept, unless you had the idea in your head, hard to know what you looking at. when you get to accurate accounts of tornadoes when they have the concept, don't want to say always, very frequently describe things in those forms no one has ever videotaped. the most frequent accounts i found, i read lots of accounts of nineteenth century tornadoes, was that they would skip, they would hop up and down, destroying a house, skip and settle somewhere else. you find this in accounts of tornadoes up until really the 18, 1970s and 1980s. note video ever has shown a tornado that formed and touched down rising again and settling down again. they don't do that. they stay on the ground until they break up.

what per these people seeing? i don't know but everyone saw it in the same way that everyone saw strange lights and colors in the funnel cloud. very frequently in nineteenth century descriptions of tornadoes they saw a red glow at the heart of the funnel cloud. they saw strange white running a fan down the funnel. they sometimes sought pattern of electrical sparkling. they saw all kinds of multicolored appearing in the clouds. none of this have ever been documented on video and i have never talked to a modern tornado chasers who saw any of this. this is a constant theme in tornado reports that. what were they looking at? i don't know. but what was happening, i think, was that they were so stunned by what they were seeing, this extraordinary thing that came out of nowhere, traveled 40 and 50 miles an hour, that could

level account in a matter of a few seconds, they were projecting their own terror on to it and because it went by so fast, they had all kinds of strange notions, what was it? and because of that tornado accounts tend to be from the nineteenth century very colorful, very strange and beautiful but not really very trustworthy as accounts of what a tornado actually is. it was a very, very long process, a very slow process which i trace in my book by which various experts managed to think coherently about tornadoes. and that is a question not only of science but of human psychology. that lead to bitter feuds, the first half of my book recounts a few between the two leading

scientists in america in the early nineteenth century who had opposed views on tornadoes and one of whom, a man named james espy who believe the with a rising column of air and the other named william redfield who thought a tornado rotated. james espy thought was a rising column of air and refused to believe tornadoes rotated and redfield thought they rotated that refuse to believe it was a rising column of air. when either was presented with irrefutable evidence of the other side they just said to the witness, people who lived through the storms, you are wrong. you saw it wrong, you didn't see it. they were both unshakable in this for 20 years and the fight was so vitriolic they actually manage to paralyzed american science for the entire length of the few. everyone had to choose sides. neither side would give any

quarter to the other. they became more respected and got prestigious positions, were able to thwart their opposing people from getting jobs and the thing is they were both right. a tornado is both a rising column of air and as it rises it rotates and when people would describe this to these two guys they would say it can't be. there is no way. because of that, they were able to paralyzed the country's development in meteorology up until the 1850s. and they never actually saw the other guy's view.they never cracked. they died in stand left the question unresolved and it was a later generation of meteorologist who took up the problem again and figured out the solution.

the result of that was we lost a whole generation and lost a generation of people studying tornadoes just as people were moving into the midwest and where the information would have been enormously valuable. i want to tell you one story about that. i will tell you one story and see if anybody has any questions. in the 1870s there was a man named john finley who was with the united states signal corps. the united states signal corps after the civil war had taken upon itself to become our national weather service. a originally this had been done by the smithsonian institution but for a variety of reasons during the civil war they lost their spotters, people from the south stopped participating

obvious reasons and everybody else became absorbed by the war, all of their networks of spotter's they set up and also a bad fire at the smithsonian in 1865 and the laudable records got destroyed so they went to the government and said we can't do it anymore and the signal corps's main responsibility was communication on the battlefield were in those days looking for some reason to stay in business. this is the way bureaucracy's always work, institution was created, it served its purpose. america was at peace and the signal corps said instead of saying we should stand and meld into the regular army said we need to try to find something else to do and came upon the idea we will take over the weather service. it sounds like just a boondoggle but they actually took this responsibility very seriously, they began predicting the weather, they were the first

people to issue daily weather forecasts and worked out a system and this is a part of america's texture of everyday life that we have completely forgotten, no reason to remember that set up a system where post offices and train stations all over america would fly flags each day to tell what the weather was which is how you got your weather. you would glance at the train station and you would see a big flag flying overhead and you knew the codes, clear whether, blue meant rain and particularly alarming to people was a red flag with the black circle which meant it was going to change and there would be a sudden frost and that was one that farmers needed to see.

it was considered so urgent lot of trains passing through farmlands with 5 those flags under the trains so farmers would see low warning flag as the train passed and they began collecting weather reports from all over the country. and one of the things they began collecting reports on was tornadoes. tornadoes do happen on the east coast but they happen very rarely. there was a meteorologist in the 1850s who tried to put together a list of all the recorded tornadoes in new england and found 16. that went back 150 years. when the weather service at the signal corps began collecting fees reports they were coming up with dozens of reports of tornadoes in the midwest every year. and they thought that this was something that really deserved

investigating, and sending people out to do field reports. this became something of that was a feature of midwestern life. if there had been a really bad storm a few days later, an army guy would show up and start asking people what happened, what can you tell us about what happened and they also began hearing from these people in these towns how often tornadoes hit their towns and this was something up until then, nobody in the government, nobody outside the towns had never really paid attention to at all but they found, you can still, people still do this today. they found in almost town -- every town they went to even places they were visiting along the way when they mentioned somebody would say we had a tornado 20 years ago and they would find everybody in the town did everything that happened in the town from that event.

everyone in iowa, nebraska, kansas, illinois, every town would say we build a school house three years after the big tornado. that was the big cultural landmark zenith's all sorts of strange apparitions of tornadoes, multicolored tornadoes, tornadoes that would split in half, two tornadoes that would collide and form one big tornado, clouds where there were five or six for native is dangling down from them, everybody had a strange tornadoes story. the other thing that they began discovering, they didn't know what to call it. today we call it post-traumatic stress disorder but they found in these towns people who had been through tornadoes a lot of them never recovered. they would often say when -- oh yes, johnnie over revers, he went through the bad tornado and

it starts clouding up in the southwestern sky and he starts crying. when was the big tornado? 30 years ago. thirty years later people were still -- had still not recovered from the tornadoes. i fast-talking to people now because a lot of people do have tornadoes stories. and people will tell me i was in a tornado when i was a kid and still have nightmares about it. i still freak out every time i see a bad storm coming from the southwest. it is part of the texture of people's lives. and there was a tornado in 1878 in a town called irving, kan.. this man i was telling you about, john finley, his first tornado survey when he was with the signal corps was sent out to report on what happened.

here is what happened, perfect farmland community we have seen through iowa and kansas and the midwest, very lovely little town, one afternoon a bad storm came up, they saw the funnel cloud, the final cloud cut through the heart of the town, knocked out, injured a lot of people and then was gone and as often happens with tornadoes the weather immediately afterwards was gorgeous so everybody he emerges from their shelters, they see that there is a lot of damage in their town but they look around and see this beautiful countryside and blue skies and when they attack in the direction the tornado had come from a saw something and when they had seen was nothing they had never seen before and there are, i found, other tornado reports like this, some

kind of very rare form tornadoes took. they describe it, it looked like there was suddenly a black mountain in the southwest that had a complete the flat face that was more than two miles long, when thousands of feet into the air. and appeared out of nowhere and was moving straight towards them. they had no idea what it was but it came through the town and reduced it in a matter of seconds to splinters, left this enormous trail of damage to the heart of the town, killed several people who had just been through the early tornado and we're coming out of the wreckage and suddenly were killed by this apparition out of nowhere. the storm passed through the town, disappeared to the northeast and was gone and no one ever figured out what it was but they room left with this debris behind and win finley arrived in the town to do his

report he discovered these are very resilient heartland people, the worst that happens to them as they were pulling things together, clearing away the debris, buried their dead, cared for their injured, were starting already to try to rebuild the core of the town, indents halfway cut through the heart of it. and he thought this is the resilience of the american people, a strong point but the longer he stayed in the town the more he became aware that wasn't all that happened. a lot of the people who had been through the tornado couldn't sleep. they couldn't sleep anymore. everyone in the town, their families, they would go to bed each night and these people would just lie awake, unable to sleep, shaking with terror. the only thing that they could figure out to do, they didn't have any explanation for this, they would just do it, dozens of

people scattered through this town would in the middle of the night to get out of bed, carry a lantern, walk over to the damage track of the tornado and just stand there all night, all looking at the southwestern sky waiting for the tornado to come back. they did that every single night and it was when finley saw that, that he said to himself, took an oath to himself he had to figure out a way of predicting tornadoes. and if you wants to know what happened then you have got to read the book. thanks for listening. does anybody have any questions? we will have a microphone here. anything i can follow up on for you? >> i was wondering if anybody had the native americans's take on foreign aid as. >> i have a lot about that in the book.

they did, they have a lot of legends and stories about them and worked out a lot of practical ways of dealing with them. a lot of the tribes who essentially where nomads during the summer would work out ways, because in this part of the country you see storms coming from hours ahead and recognize potentially tornadic storms from a long way off and would dig trenches to hide in and wood hollow out hillsides and use them as the impromptu chorales for the annals traveling with, bison and horses and had a good sense practical sense of how to survive and the other thing, as the tornado came closer they were all afraid to get there. most of the indian nations had stories about for a nose and most of them, they believed prayer would actually speak to the tornado. the tornado speaks our language. sometimes they said we are responsible for the.

we caused them because we are under a curse or something so they thought we have got our own magic spell we can use. probably psychologically not a bad technique to stay sane when a tornado is passing. certainly effective in the southwest corner. i don't know. i can hear you, that will work. >> this particular one that finley was researching in kansas. >> it was in the middle of the day, late afternoon. >> must have been something people didn't see coming which is why they were going out. >> i think it was a reaction that since it had come completely out of nowhere they thought we have to keep watch

and when it sneaks back upon the town it would be during at night because no one could see it. that is why they were out there watching. i think that was the thinking and also just reaction if the thing you were most afraid of is the tornado, you can sleep, it was kind of a practical response. a way of managing pt as the. >> when did people start noticing the birds and animals's preparation for storms? >> the native americans have always claimed to use this as weather signs. how true that is -- >> i know it. >> the tornado i was in i didn't see any birds leaving before hand. i can't make any guesses myself about that. >> you heard about the one we had here. >> yes. you know, i found a report, in

an earlier book that i wrote to where i described the earthquake and there was a report that all the squirrels in that part of the midwest have that two days before and. i don't know whether any squirrels went anywhere but it is the sort of thing people want to say that animals do sense storms before hand. whether they really do or not, i think, has more to do with what you want to believe more than what evidence is actually there. i don't want -- you could be right. i don't want to destroy anybody's dreams about this. i just don't know of any actual data that says it is true. >> release from images in your book for me is people who had colin's milk in their pocket. this was a tornado combined with a fire. are there a lot of tornado type

artifacts people hold on to? >> oh sure. >> have you collected some? >> i have a collection of images i was trying to get a publisher to put in but they thought it would double the price of the vote which was a little unreasonable but if some publisher wants the book about tornado artifacts i have a lot of samples of this but people do cling to these things as magic tokens and tend to draw tornadoes. in the nineteenth century there were a lot of surviving homemade earth and jugs that have tornadoes symbols on them. it was very common in the midwest, american folk art. there's quite a lot of that. the fire tornado is a special case. is one of the most freakish events not just about american meteorology but never reported on the planet and for a long

time people, there has the huge controversy as to what really happened. in my book i have for reconstruction of what the eye witnesses said but as i point out that is not necessarily scientifically accurate. the thing is gigantic fire storm that formed in forests create their own weather. they do create thunderstorms. we are not aware of it because the heat of the fire usually raises the rain before it reaches the ground but a creative self sustaining weather system and there have been a few instances where these stores were so severe that they spawned tornadoes and the one that happened in wisconsin, the same night as the great chicago fire there was a huge drought in the midwest and fires broke out in several areas, an immense thunderstorm formed over this intense forest fire the tornado was spawned at the heart of the

storm and the of the draft drew flames from the forests into the funnel so that what people saw coming for them was a gigantic tornado made out of fire. on youtube you can find videos of very small, sometimes called fire world's or fire tornadoes form over intensifiers so it does happen. it is very rare to be at that level of intensity and it came through the town just destroyed it. reduced the town to ashes in seconds. the people who survived plunged into the river. the problem was they were so spellbound by the sight of this tornado coming towards them that a lot of them leered above water, just couldn't look away from the thing that was coming and had permanent eye damage

because their eyeballs were scorched. it is a rare phenomenon. it happened in tokyo in the 20s after a major earthquake when a fire tornado formed in the heart of a fire that was burning the city down. i also found one that happened in the drought region of australia. no one witness said that in the aftermath they found the distinct track of the tornado. it lasted 20 or 30 minutes and came through the heart of this fire is unknown. they do happen. hard to believe they do happen on this planet as opposed to some other planet but they do happen. they are quite rare but quite astonishing. and the physics of them is quite mysterious a lot of the more bizarre things that were reported, people had their clothes and touch and coins in their pockets melted. all kinds of strange things happened that people cannot account for now because it is

not something that happens the next. people have not worked out the physics of it. anything else? no? >> you mentioned images, if they're too expensive to put in a book like that have you thought about the e-book? >> we're talking about that, if there is enough interest from people putting together a gallery of this stuff on my web site so we will see. it is a whole separate discussion. >> not that simple to have random house? >> the thing about publishing is it is not that simple to do anything. you would be amazed at the things you would think would be simple that turn out not to be simple. i had discussions with my publishers about subtitles of books where they said to me we have a whole meeting about your subtitle and we don't finch your

subtitle works, we have to change it. and i have looked at this and thought are you serious? these people who are grown people, adults who have professional jobs are sitting around arguing about what word should happen in western border in the subtitle and when you set i don't think it matters, yes it does. we are certain it matters. [inaudible] >> i do like earning money. that is an interest of mine but if nothing else happens i might put something together for people who are interested in following. >> how they did -- >> i don't know how they'd do it. if somebody would tell me on my blog. >> these images. >> i will see what i can do. check my web site. terp maybe something coming up.

>> question -- >> is that it? okay. >> i am wondering what travelling you did in researching the book. >> i grew up in the midwest and spend a lot of time traveling when i was younger and in certain amateur things. for this but i am told to do this stuff, finally asked and the other thing is the last really bad storm i saw was so frightening that i thought what on earth that my trying to do to get anywhere near this thing? this one i did just on my study. i did talk to people who had done storm chasing. people have said reasonably after what storm chasing is like now which is a whole industry, not just that people are chasing a for science. a lot of them are doing it for fun and a lot are doing it for money. if you have a couple thousand spare dollars you can book a tornado for where they will take

you around the midwest chasing tornadoes yourself. they don't guarantee you will see a tornado. they guarantee you will see severe weather but we can't predict whether there will be a tornado or not and people come from all over the world for the chance to see a tornado. >> wicked rivers is about the mississippi and it is a swashbuckling hotel. you were invited to write another similar thing and -- >> they wanted a good story. we just had a topic of tornadoes and when i started researching it was when i found all this stuff out about redfield and finley which as far as i can tell no one has written much about. it is a part of american history that is largely forgotten so it was a pleasure to reconstruct this. >> the next book is about your

past in a tom sawyer sort of background. >> of family history from the 1850s until the present. >> do you have another historic book? >> i do. down the road, signed contracts for this, i will write about the early days of electrification in nineteenth century america. about two years. >> would it go faster if he just published it as an e-book? >> there will be an e-book. there is an e-book of this and there will be of that as well. >> i was -- it was wonderful. it was very entertaining to see how you took this phenomenon, this terrible catastrophe and a

round it you discussed cultural, sociological, historical, psychological reaction to a, attempts to understand how the mind distorts things for various reasons, these hallucinations, in the early accounts. >> i assure you i never met this gentleman before. he is not a planned. >> there is a lot of culture. for example, that scientific controversy, two guys so staunch in their own half of the story. and amazing story. just ranting and raving now. >> don't know how anybody else feels. >> it reminds me of the culture

wars. >> what you discover when you read american history enough is things haven't changed all that much in the same way there's a lot about these bizarre governmental bureaucratic infighting in the nineteenth century that makes you feel things like the government shutdowns now are just the way people have always run government in america. >> want to ask one question. really a powerful subject about this incredible violence that exists in nature all the time. in different forms like the meteor that came down. what was the nature of your attraction to this? because it is a wonderful subject. >> as far as other that growing up in the midwest, i was in one of when i was 17 and that haunted my imagination when i

started working on this. the thing that was most striking about that experience, happened to be -- it was a beautiful summer morning, it had been raining all day and it cleared up. i was standing at the door of my house about to go out, i had my hand on the doorknob and all of a sudden the street outside got pitch black and everything that wasn't nailed down went straight up in the air. this was the week tornado. all it did was knocked down a bunch of trees and damaged roofs and there were a few minor injuries. nobody was killed. one of the things i found most useful about it was i knew intellectually that that had to be a tornado but i didn't see any funnel cloud, i didn't see anything that resembles the classical tornado and i realized that was how this series. i knew it had to be a tornado. 100 years ago wouldn't have had

a clue. i would have been completely mystified. that was a good insight into how people back then could live through these things and have no idea what they were. >> i need to get the book to have the whole story. >> please do. >> my ancestors who came from scandinavia and in the 1870s, one of them had a daily diary, did that for 40 years, danish english, i am fascinated by your mentioning that the recountings that people would see lights and colors and your reference to that could be partly their fear and they wrestle wrapped up because they came from not ever having had any kind of

experience with that and still to this day, growing up in are going at you talk about the weather first and other things to follow a check on the weather first, do you suppose the power of suggestion, someone heard that someone said that this thing was so amazing and they saw lights and colors and that is what they're looking for them? >> i don't know. that is an interesting theory. part of the problem is you can find trained scientists who claim to have seen these things. i found a report from the early 1970s bath a tornado in alabama passed by a nasa installation where all these scientists working for nasa when outside and watch this tornado come across. was nighttime and there was a lot of lightning but they are reported these mysterious colors. that was something where you have got actual trained

observers, trained scientists and they are seeing it and i don't think it was the power of suggestion. by have been because there was so much lightning and lightning in clouds can cause peculiar effect. if you they see the lightning itself with the clouds and light up it can be very strange so that is possibly -- but they didn't think it had anything to do with lightning. they were seeing blows random flashes. what it does i don't have the slightest idea. is one of these things that makes tornadoes so fascinating. >> you live in chicago. when you get a tornado warning? >> i have a basement without a window. i live in an old victorian building. i also have an interior closet. we can collect our cats and hide in there. one point about that is really kind of worrisome, people in

chicago when they sound the tornado simon's last time that happened several years ago my wife happened to be on an elevated platform when the sirens came off and she was the only person who knew what it meant. we are kind of going backwards in tornado awareness and the warble tornado in missouri, there was plenty of warning, the weather service went public -- the alarm went perfectly and people have no idea what to do it even if they knew what to do they had nowhere to hide because most of the big -- the midwest is getting horribly overbuilt and new housing is going up all over the place and very few of the houses have basements, very few have the simplest form shoulders at all. people are generally pretending it doesn't matter. stopped doing any kind of elementary preparedness for tornadoes. that is kind of worry some when you think we're getting so

oversbuilt, less country for tornadoes to pass through harmlessly. more and more they will be coming through occupied areas because more of the land is occupied. people don't seem to know what to do. that is a worrying thing for the future that our preparedness is fading out. people are just trusting. in flux. >> have there been any contemporary instances of the black mountain you describe? >> not that i have been able to find but i found accounts of tornadoes in the early 20th century, especially the worst tornado on record which was the tristate tornado which was in 1925, started in missouri and crossed through illinois into indiana. the people who saw it, no one reported seeing a funnel. they just saw of this black moving shape.

there are some reports that there were more than one of fungal simultaneously with in this cloud. it is not exactly the same but similar enough that that might have been what was happening with this strange one in kansas. it might have been -- seeing those surrounding cloud and multiple funnels. that is just a guess. no one really knows. >> a teenager in a high school science class, is there something to have a hypothesis to assess and provable a vice of tornadoes, just daily weather patterns, are there still things out there you can ask the question and be looking for evidence? >> interesting question. the weather service relies on a

kind of gross spread of information. they don't have a lot of fine grain and a lot of places and if the teenager were keeping a weather log now the key to do with computers to get more accurate than just writing it down. it is useful information over the long haul to see how -- a lot of people in the community doing it, you could actually help build up, the more data meteorologist have, the more raw data, to predict whether. they lose the fine grain, if you are looking at a large area you don't have enough information. one of the reasons tornadoes are so hard to predict, and tornado forms with in this gigantic supercell thunderstorm and this huge environment forms in a very

small space initially. and it may be we can never get a close enough look, detailed enough look at what happened in this form to see that moment of formation. and they will announce tomorrow, they talked to people who thought we will never be able to do it. the more information you have, and when people do that, becoming much more aware of the weather, a continuous process and not just something that happens in occasional freak events is useful if you are trying to learn about meteorology. >> all of the information, and all of you, we have storms and 25% off and we could river is an exciting tale of the mississippi river. and -- >> my pleasure.

[applause] >> for more information visit the author's website, lee sandlin.com. >> here are the latest headlines around the publishing industry this past week. the penguin group has announced a biography of margaret thatcher will be released tuesday, april 23rd. a week after former prime minister's funeral. margaret thatcher, authorized biography volume 1, not returning was commissioned in 1997 under the condition it would be released following her death. the biography is written by telegraph editor charles more. barnes and noble has announced the release of the company's new self publishing platform. it allows authors to write, edit and publish their work through the book and sell their publications through the press and receive royalties. the city of new york will pay

the occupy wall street movement and librarian $47,000 to settle lawsuits over stolen and destroy books. and after 3600 books received in an overnight raid in 2011. according to the lawsuit the city returned only 1,000 books to the occupy library. and lawyer fees for occupy wall street. send the date on breaking news about authors, books and publishing by liking us on facebook at facebook.com/booktv or follow us on twitter at booktv. visit our web site, booktv.org and click on news about books. >> would like to think it is an important book in the sense it tells you how the court works. there are so few good books out there that explain the fraud says and how they go about this and how to decide these cases and what are they saying to one

another? what are they really thinking? do their personal feelings get into it? also about how the board operates. >> when you dig into the notes in the library of congress, the memoranda, the notes back and forth, and a lot is available. >> i am not a lawyer. and whatever you guys do. i was fascinated by the human side of it. in many cases justices see that justices have reservations about capital punishment. >> abc news veterans martin clancy and tim o'brien on capital punishment cases that defined the supreme court sunday night at 9:00 on afterwards, part of booktv on c-span2. here is a look at some books being published this week. kay bailey hutchinson, a former

republican senator from texas details women's contributions to her state. in unflinching courage pioneering women who shaped texas. the federalist society, how conservatives took the law back from liberals, michael avery and daniel mclaughlin how the federalist society for law and public policy studies gained influence in politics under federal law. and state department adviser for afghanistan and pakistan argues the obama administration should have taken a different approach to the middle east rather than continuing the policies of the bush administration in the american foreign policy in retreat. in the ultimate obama survival guide how to survive, thrive and prosper, executive vice chairman of the conservative caucus presents his thoughts on the obama administration. a history of chicago and the influence it had on the economy

and the arts in the third post, when chicago built the american dream. in beyond more, rear imagining american influence in a new lease, pull the prize-winning reporter david rose presents his thoughts on american foreign policy decisions in the middle east. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org. >> you are watching booktv and we are live for the 2013 annapolis book festival, an event in its eleventh year at the key school in maryland. here's our lineup for the day. in a minute we will have a panel on maryland since 1812 and then look at the future of urban development with peter and alan karenall. jake tamper and john noggel will talk about the war in afghanistan and whether w