The Man Who Caught the Storm is the story of Tim Samaris, history’s self-taught tornado chaser. Without any special training and little government funding, he managed to put a probe in the path of an F4 tornado, something all the scientists and meteorologists claimed to be impossible. With steely nerves and heart- stopping chase, Samaras pierced the heart of the tornado, giving the weather prediction community vital information to understand a great mystery of the plains. Finally, he met the largest tornado ever recorded with tragic results. This narrative takes you inside the mysterious beast we call a tornado and examines the unique traits of a man obsessed with knowing what makes a tornado tick.

Samaris invented a probe to measure wind speeds, barometric pressure, humidity, and temperature inside a tornado. He designed it to be small enough to deploy just ahead of a tornado and hoped it would not be picked up by the winds. This was by far the easiest step. He had to get the probe in the path of a tornado to get the data he was looking for. Though the odds were long, Samaris had an uncanny knack for finding tornadoes.

Any particular spot in the country will meet a tornado, on average, once every 4,000 years.

Although I knew about this book since it was written in 2018, and a copy was given to me last year by my mother, I hadn’t read a word in it until this week. We happened to be reminiscing about the day a tornado took my parents’ homestead, and I decided to read the chapter about Manchester, SD to Craig. I had feared it would be too traumatic or too clinical. It was neither. It did stir my heart, but the author captured the scary moments with respect and sympathy.

Aside from the story, I really liked the author’s voice. He used the special jargon of a weatherman at times but also a lot of beautiful descriptions of thunderstorms and tornadoes. I especially liked the descriptions of different clouds and how they morph from majestic to deadly.

The chapter about Manchester, SD, tells of the tornado that destroyed my parents’ farmstead. I was visiting them that day with our three children and remember the atmospheric conditions described in the book. As I read how the day progressed for Samaris, my mind filled in the things I had been doing that day.

It was their basement into which Kingsbury County sheriff Charlie Smith had called “Harold? Harold?” The mud-coated basset hound found wandering around the wood and cinder blocks was their dog, Bailey. It was the destruction of their home that shed turbulence into the pressure profile sampled by Tim Samaras’s turtle. The defining moment of Tim’s life is theirs, too.

From the Epilogue of The Man Who Caught the Storm

This book was hard to put down. The action is thrilling, fearful, and poetic. If you like stories about man versus nature or events that change history, you will enjoy this book!

– Liz