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  • The Weather Matters: An American Cultural History since 1900
  • Richard P. Horwitz
The Weather Matters: An American Cultural History since 1900. By Bernard Mergen. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2008.

Weather Matters is an ambitious, richly illustrated survey of attention to weather in the United States since the turn of the twentieth century. It emphasizes the aims of signal individuals and institutions, their grand and trivial pursuits, common tongues, diverse visions and sensations. It leaves no doubt that, in fact, weather matters and for more reasons and in more ways than a casual observer might suppose.

As the endnotes detail, nearly every subtopic already has its own bibliography. Relevant scholarship has spewed from yet narrower social, artistic, or scientific stovepipes. There is a literature of forecasting (marine, mountain, plain …), of cloudscapes and of measurement gizmos, of skies that are fair or foul and everything in between. Each of these traditions, in turn, has its favored sub-subtopics and media through which they are traced: academic monographs, office directives, popular lore, poetry, prose, visual and happening arts among schools, farms, Scout troops, jokes and "firsts," museums, insurers … a huge array of broadcast, plastic, and print media, each with its own signal moments, hopes, and fears. The book is valuable for assembling such a huge range of ways that weather figures in all of these respects and therefore, too, material, social, and spiritual legacies that they afford. This is American Studies stuff.

The project has a pedigree that should be familiar to Americanists. It is part of the impressive series, "Culture America," edited by American Studies and Art History stalwarts, Karal Ann Marling and Erika Doss. The author, Bernard Mergen, for decades has been an influential professor of American Studies at George Washington University as well as Senior Editor of American Studies International, which was absorbed by this journal in 2005. Through ASI, he helped blaze a trail that has only recently become a busy jetway in the field. Prior publications of his own—including several volumes on "play and play things" and the definitive Snow in America—foreshadow the attention to detail and the mode of synthesis that pervade Weather Matters. Nearly every person who is mentioned earns a thumbnail biography, and his or her significance is related to a playful, even if solemn, bridge between order and chaos in the sky, and of fear and wonder among those who give it attention.

A reader would be hard-pressed to imagine any subject—no matter how remotely connected to rain or shine—that escapes Mergen's attention. My favorite section of the book is also the most personal: his account of an eight-day "Tempest Tour" in 2003, chasing [End Page 187] tornadoes with a professional guide, straight out of central casting. Imagine David Foster Wallace crafting "A Supposedly Fun Thing" with a kindly drill sergeant at his side. The humor could be mistaken for silly or glib, only because it is drier than most anything going on outside.

Weather Matters remains tough to categorize itself. Readers should be grateful that the book does not aim for exhaustive coverage, but the criteria used in selecting some sources or whole categories of them and ignoring others is difficult to discern, much less defend. Likewise, readers may appreciate an organization that avoids strict chronology, but the reason one discussion precedes another is left unclear. If topics or cases were engaged in an order that better clarified their significance for Americans or pointed arguments about them, I think the book would be even more valuable. But as is, Mergen has assembled an impressive riff on a century of American riffs on the weather.

Richard P. Horwitz
The Coastal Institute
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