Lee Sandlin is the author of Storm Kings: The Untold History of America's First Tornado Chasers and Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, and also reviews books for The Wall Street Journal. His essay “Losing the War” was included in the anthology The New Kings of Nonfiction. He lives in Chicago.

Photo © Frank Blau Photography

In The Distancers, seven generations worth of joy and heartache is artfully forged into a family portrait that is at once universally American yet singularly Lee Sandlin's own. From the nineteenth century German immigrants who settled on a small Midwestern farm, to the proud and upright aunts and uncles with whom... Read more

With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations

In Storm Kings, Lee Sandlin retraces America's fascination and unique relationship to tornadoes and the weather. From Ben Franklin's early experiments, to "the great storm debates" of the nineteenth century, to heartland life in the early twentieth century, Sandlin shows how tornado chasing helped foster the...

With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations

From the acclaimed author of Wicked River comes Storm Kings, a riveting tale of supercell tornadoes and the quirky, pioneering, weather-obsessed scientists whose discoveries created the science of modern meteorology.
 
While tornadoes have occasionally been spotted elsewhere, only the central plains of North America have the perfect...

A riveting narrative look at one of the most colorful, dangerous, and peculiar places in America's historical landscape: the strange, wonderful, and mysterious Mississippi River of the 19th century.
 
Beginning in the early 1800s and climaxing with the siege of Vicksburg in 1863, Wicked River brings to life a place where river...