by Mark Levine
HarperCollins
Contemporary US History / Current Affairs
Hardcover, $25.95 ISBN-13 978-1-4013-5220-2, ISBN-10 1-4013-5220-0
Trade Paperback, $14.00
ISBN-13: 978-1-4013-0947-3, ISBN-10: 1-4013-0947-X;
MBA Bookseller Information
MBA Booksellers – earn up to $75 in rebates for promoting this book! See the marketing information and rebate form below. We hope you’ll enjoy reading and selling this new book. We’d love to have your comments and recommendations, too.
Mark Levine teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop in Iowa City. He was a featured author at the MBA/ABA Spring Meeting Reception in Omaha on April 21, 2007. Levine is promoting F5 with various MBA bookstores during the summer. In response to the F5 tornado which hit Greensburg, Kansas, this spring, Miramax Books and Watermark Books & Café in Wichita will donate 100% of book sales to the rebuilding efforts of the Greensburg/Kiowa County Libraries.
Backlist titles available: three books of poetry; included in Best American anthologies – Magazine Writing, Sports Writing, Poetry.
Please note: MIDWEST CONNECTIONS rebates are not available for the paperback reprint of this 2007 MC Pick.
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About the Book
“I thoroughly enjoyed reading F5. One of my earliest memories is the Fargo, ND, tornado of June 20, 1957, where Fujita started his studies of tornadoes and came up with the Fujita scale. Nearing the 50th anniversary of that tornado, I found it enlightening to read about the families involved in the tornado outbreak of 1974, along with their joys, hopes, fears and futures. This book, in the tradition of The Children’s Blizzard, tells of nature at its worst — how quickly it can change and its effects on many lives. Levine also intertwines events of the day giving a feel for the era in which all this happened. I also highly recommend this title to anyone interested in the weather, especially due to the active spring tornado season we’ve had so far. Living on the Great Plains, we know this threat is all too real.”
- Carl Wichman, Varsity Mart Bookstore, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND“In F5 Levine brings a colossal act of nature—a storm that spun nearly 150 tornadoes through the Heartland—down to human scale by following the lives of the people most affected and by describing the cultural context of America in the slump of the early 1970s. He gives us corner stores and broken bones, AM rock and Gerald Ford. It’s a big story made up of small pieces of temporary defeat and long-lived resilience.”
- Mark David Bradshaw, Watermark Books & Café, Wichita, KS“This book will find a prominent place on my Books of Local Interest table. I’ve been looking for a good ‘tornado book,’ and F5 will do very well in my store.”
- Keri Holmes, The Kaleidoscope: Our Focus is You, Hampton IA
The most devastating outbreak of the century occurred on April 3, 1974, when 148 tornados touched down in 13 states from Michigan to Mississippi, killing hundreds and damaging thousands of homes. This super-outbreak is the subject of F5: Devastation, Survival and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the 20th Century, the gripping new book by award-winning magazine writer Mark Levine.
On the day of the 1974 tornado catastrophe, the social and political climate of the country was no more stable than the weather: the military failure in Vietnam was at the forefront of people’s minds; Nixon’s approval ratings were a mere 65% (the lowest ever for a sitting president); crime was way up and the economy—in the midst of oil rationing—was in the doldrums. And, like the weather, history has a way of repeating itself. Today we are once again faced with a grim and uncertain war, historically low presidential approval ratings, and an oil crisis. As a nation with many parallel concerns, we are in a prime position to view the circumstances surrounding the 1974 outbreak through empathetic eyes.
F5 expertly examines the atmospheric ingredients of the disaster, but at its heart it’s less about science and more about a collision between everyday life and broad, uncontrollable forces. In the foreground of F5 is Limestone County, Alabama, where two tornados (a category 4 and a category 5—the most severe) struck within 30-minutes. In Limestone, we meet a number of ordinary people whose lives are dramatically changed by the storm and its aftermath. These include a pair of teenage lovers, a small-town Sheriff, a preacher, and an aerospace technician given to religious visions. It is the struggle of these people—to hold their lives and their families together under sudden, enormous pressure—that drives the book.
