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The Crazies

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This blogger skimmed “The Crazies, The Cattleman, The Wind Prospector, and A War Out West” by Amy Gamerman, published in 2025. The author made a very bad editorial decision not to include an index in this volume. With an index, it could have been a reference book, but instead, was a mishmash of the history of a family of ranchers in the Crazy Mountains, and brief biographical descriptions of the stakeholders and their activities in a decades-long fight over a renewable-energy project in Montana.

As an aside, in the past decade or so, journalists who publish books are getting sloppier and lazier than ever. It appears that they slap together the articles on a specific topic that they’ve written over a number of years, and fail to edit and organize those articles in a coherent way. And the book gets published, as is.

Anyway, in June 2004, a wind-farm entrepreneur named Marty Wilde oversaw the construction of a wind tower on a Montana ranch owned by the Jarrett family, on behalf of the company named Crazy Mountain Cattle. That tower took all kinds of measurements of the copious wind in the area, for more than a year. Then a wind map was made. Wilde had to front all expenses until the wind-farm was actually built before he could collect a developer’s fee and royalties– which could take years, decades, or not happen at all.

Building a wind farm involves an extremely complicated set of steps involving the law, politics, economics and the environment. In the mid-single-digit 2000’s, part of the wind-farm was to be built on land where lived the Blackfeet Tribe, Native Americans. Thanks to a grant Wilde secured from the US Department of Energy, the Tribe’s community college had most of its 100-kilowatt electricity bill (charged by the Glacier Electric Cooperative) paid for using a wind turbine donated by a California company called Vestas. The school’s students were employed to erect that turbine on its campus. That was still one of the early steps in terms of a full-fledged wind farm.

In 2008, the original plans called for eighty megawatts to deliver electricity to twenty-six thousand homes. But Marty Wilde and Rick Jarrett needed buy-in from Jarrett’s neighbors.

Read the book to learn how Wilde and Jarrett fared– their triumphs and setbacks, in connection with laws, legal rulings, and actions from all the numerous people and parties up until the book’s writing, that basically involved redistribution of wealth among the wealthy lawyers and their clients (excepting Rick Jarrett, who found he couldn’t make a living ranching). As usual, curious things will happen when there’s dishonor among thieves.

The Loom of Time

The Book of the Week is “The Loom of Time, Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China” by Robert S. Kaplan, published in 2023. This redundant volume contained a hodgepodge of articles on the author’s observations, information and opinions gleaned from interviews, of his travels all over the Middle East over the course of decades, through wars, regime changes and anarchy.

Kaplan provided only a brief overview; for, all through the Post-WWII Era to date, America’s foreign policy has involved providing a lot of CIA-related (non-Congress-approved!) financial, military and / or humanitarian aid to its allies-of-the-moment, a lot of whose details have been kept top-secret, and are still classified.

Kaplan made generalizations on the evolution, advances and declines of Middle Eastern and Central Asian nations. He wrote that a nation whose military takes over its leadership, is one in decline. The author briefly described Egypt’s past leaders, including Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, and Egypt’s “Arab Spring” between 2011 and 2013.

During Mubarak’s ousting, ordinary Egyptians were traumatized by the street violence. They simply wanted quiet and economic security. Even after the regime change, free speech was banned, and dissidents were tortured and killed. Yes, the chaos had dissipated, but the people were still forced to live under crushing oppression.

The author contradicted himself in saying that the Obama administration chose not to aid ordinary Egyptians in ousting the dictatorial Mubarak, but later, Kaplan implied that the American government was somehow involved in the ousting. No more details were provided. Military man al Sisi became the new top Egyptian leader, while the extremist Muslim Brotherhood also gained significant political power.

The American Republican Party viciously smeared Obama for making Egyptians worse off. They say it was all his fault. Nevertheless, Egyptians varied in their views on whether the political situation had improved or worsened, depending on their own circumstances. A big hindrance to developing democracy in a country is educating the peasants, of which Egypt has a large number, who are easily brainwashed by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Geopolitically, one thing leads to another. Egypt’s political instability was related to its inability to fulfill its water needs, as Ethiopia appropriated a portion of the Nile river in its own territory– building infrastructure to meet its own electricity needs.

The author commented naively, that “Quietly, methodically, in a strange way” China is becoming financially intertwined with Egypt. China has a controlling interest in a Suez Canal infrastructure project– a major international trading conduit– and urban construction projects. Perhaps Kaplan is unaware that for decades, China has been contracting with numerous countries to build infrastructure for them. It has significant financial stakes in many large American corporations.

The author goes on to describe how China signed on to pave streets, build new housing and transportation, skyscrapers and parks in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. China has already begun assembling highways and byways in the Soviet “Stans” territories, and is planning to ultimately build a paved trade-route beginning in China that runs through Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Eurasia.

The author visited Sulaymaniyah in Kurdistan in northern Iraq. American-taxpayer dollars kick-started the multi-religious political arrangement that has allowed the Kurds to live relatively peacefully since the Second Gulf War. The younger generation has technology, but the older generation is corruption-entrenched. Their uni-ethnic society (two factions of Kurds) is thus vulnerable to unrest from haters. There are free elections but the politicians go unregulated. (Sounds familiar!) Armed men run the country.

Read the book to learn a bit about the ancient history and recent geopolitics of various lands of Middle East and Central Asia; however, in order to connect the dots, the reader must pore over the entire book from cover to cover. Or already have gleaned context and background through the most efficient way to read history– personal accounts of politicians and leaders with historical backdrop, or “life and times” biographies.

The Oracle of Oil

The Book of the Week is “The Oracle of Oil, A Maverick Geologist’s Quest For A Sustainable Future” by Mason Inman, published in 2016.

The author– a journalist rather than a historian or academic– described redundantly in great detail, certain issues and historical events (perhaps those from sources to which he had easy access), and omitted or provided scant coverage on a bunch of others that were equally important.

The text was like Swiss cheese. He failed to mention the geopolitical issues of oil refining, oil spills, mergers of oil companies, nuclear disasters, and lawsuits and scandals that were game-changers in the energy arena.

If this volume was meant to be a career biography, the author should have simply said there were numerous issues and historical events that affected the subject’s career, but they were beyond the scope of the book. He could have simply named them without giving extensive depth to some and omitting others altogether.

Anyway, King Hubbert was born in 1903 in central Texas. He attended the University of Chicago, a focal point of intellectual ferment back in the day. He became a geologist and began working in the oil industry, which was in its infancy. He alternately worked and returned to school to earn higher academic degrees, during which he met theorists such as himself.

One was Howard Scott, whose early 1920’s vision consisted of a Communist society (all industries would be government-owned) which, through certificates rather than currency, would fulfill all of its citizens’ basic needs; food, clothing, housing, etc., pursuant to the amount of energy required to manufacture those goods. The people would work only sixteen hours a week, and have lots of leisure time.

By the early twentieth century, academics were spending untold amounts of time debating the merits of political, social and cultural systems– their own, and other nations’. In the 1920’s, they despaired that automation was putting people out of work, and monster-sized corporations manufactured their durable goods with “planned obsolescence” in mind. Propaganda even then, was persuading consumers to throw out old cars, machines and material goods (instead of repairing them), and buy new ones. In 1930, the nation was gobsmacked by the Great Depression.

In early 1932, Hubbert, Howard, and a few other engineers and scientists, included their aforementioned utopian fantasy in the theory of Technocracy, generating a report. Hubbert wrote the portion covering chemistry and physics. Engineers and scientists, rather than greedy capitalists, would direct their economy.

Two of their ideas have somewhat come to pass in modern society (a century later!):

Scientists and engineers (who are also greedy capitalists, from Silicon Valley) are controlling the world’s communications systems (and the U.S. government and economy); and
money has not altogether been eliminated, but two kinds of Socialistic means of exchange have been introduced in recent decades– the Euro and electronic currencies.

On the other hand, capitalism and consumerism have produced an abundance of material goods in the United States–to which other nations have aspired– lifting worldwide living standards. Yet, there is still extreme poverty, even in the United States. The overall cause of this paradox, is human nature– greed, guilt, fear and exclusivity.

Back in the 1940’s and for the next few decades, Hubbert and others made projections as to the amount of the earth’s fossil fuels still to be exploited by humans for their energy needs. His predictions were the most cautious. He truly cared about accurately analyzing data to publicize the truth.

In the early 1960’s, the newly elected president John F. Kennedy tasked committees with doing studies. There was interagency rivalry between the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Academy of Sciences. There were conflicts of interest, of course. Federal agency employees were clinging to their jobs and therefore trying to maximize their budgets. Oil-industry employees were hoping to get the government to pass legislation favorable to themselves.

The Atomic Energy Council (AEC) was a federal agency that approved the sites on which nuclear power plants were built. In 1966, the AEC refused to release a report critical of its nuclear waste disposal practices in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, salt mines in Kansas, Hanford in Washington state, and the Nuclear Reactor Testing Station in Idaho. Written by Hubbert’s committee, that report basically stated that the sites were cancer clusters. Nevertheless, by the mid-1980’s, approximately ninety nuclear power plants had become operational in the United States.

The author did mention that fracking is extremely damaging to the earth but didn’t mention how extremely damaging it is to people. Besides, it is extremely expensive, so shale gas drillers must take on crushing debt load.

In sum, there are no easy, simple solutions to the current fragmented, complex energy crises that plague the world. At the dawn of the 1970’s, Hubbert was proven correct in his assessments, but unsurprisingly, all the energy stakeholders in America clouded the issues with excessive propaganda. Read the book anyhow, to learn of Hubbert’s trials and tribulations in his trying to tell people what they didn’t want to hear.

Outrageous Acts / The Fifth Risk

Since nonfiction books on discrimination and software are all political these days, here’s a double post, although admittedly, the connection between them is tenuous.

[One sidenote: Trump has recently stolen yet another Reaganism but put a new twist on it. Trump used the word “bloodbath.” Reagan said during the Vietnam-Era anti-war protests, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.”]

The first Book of the Week is “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” by Gloria Steinem, published in 1983. This volume consisted of a compilation of the author’s columns on discrimination, politics and her personal life.

In a summer 1969 column, Steinem wrote of “Feminist Realization”– when American women became aware of how deeply political their position was. She volunteered to help with the presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and George McGovern in 1968, but because she was a female, their personnel cut her down. She refrained from working on important matters, lest people spread the rumor that she was sleeping with the candidate.

In October 1968, Nixon remarked, “Well, I had my staff count up all the issues I’ve made statements on, and it came to one hundred and sixty-seven issues. Of course, Hubert [Humphrey]’s been on both sides of every question, so he has twice as many.”

In 1972, in Steinem’s eyes, unlike Richard Nixon– McGovern inspired hope. Nixon therefore not only lacked charisma, but spurred emotional trouble and anger against McGovern.

Read the book to learn much more about the tenor of the times for Steinem and other American females, when the Women’s Movement began to really gather steam.

The second Book of the Week is “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis, published 2018.

In this short volume, the author wrote about how software has been revolutionizing various areas of Americans’ lives by assessing risk. It used to be called “Big Data” but it’s now called AI. The author stuck to a few subjects in which analysts processed scads and scads of data that were public, for instance, to contain dangerous nuclear waste, make farming more efficient, and warn people about life-threatening weather conditions.

However, the government argues that all that number-crunching of personal data (by which Big Brother is violating the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) is the cost of keeping Americans safe.

Anyway, at the time of the book’s writing, the author wrote that people in hazmat suits at the nine nuclear facilities (which closed in 1987) called Hanford in the state of Washington, were still continuing to clean up the substances that cause cancer, birth-defects and genetic-disorders: strontium 90, uranium, plutonium, chromium, tritium, cesium, carbon tetrachloride, and iodine 129, among others. These substances account for two-thirds of all the toxic waste contained in toxic-waste sties in the United States.

In 2017, a profit-seeking organization called AccuWeather was trying to get taxpayers to pay again to get their weather updates. They were already paying for public information provided by the government-owned National Weather Service. AccuWeather dispensed that public information to its own paying customers.

Read the book to learn more about how AI is doing great things in a few select areas.

Peace

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Peace, the biography of a symbol (sic)” by ken kolsbun with michael s. sweeney (sic) published in 2008. This colorful volume described how a symbol has gone viral worldwide. That symbol is an instantaneous message that its bearer is anti-nuclear, anti-war and / or anti-discrimination.

English artist Gerald Holtom invented and mass-produced the “peace sign” (hereinafter abbreviated ps; consisting of a circle bisected by a vertical line, and on the bottom half, an upside-down “v”), to be attached to picket signs for a 1958 anti-nuclear-weapons march in Britain. Thereafter, the ps was used on what became all sorts of memorabilia, repeatedly, internationally in different kinds of protests.

After WWII, the governments of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. brainwashed many of their citizens into thinking that the other nation (the enemy (!)) would use nuclear weapons to make war. According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References, Bibliography and index), beginning in December 1960, Bradford Lyttle led ps-displaying members of the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA)– (pacifists urging American and Soviet nuclear disarmament) in a march from San Francisco to New York City, through Western Europe, that ended in Moscow in October 1961.

In November 1961, the group Women Strike for Peace (WSP; a spinoff of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) was afraid that usage of nuclear weapons at the newly constructed Berlin Wall would trigger more widespread hostilities and globally cause slow, painful deaths due to cancer. So they led about 50,000 ps-bearing females (many of whom had children) to go on strike; alpha males with hubris syndrome were the perpetrators of massively destructive war tools, after all.

In autumn 1963, freedom walkers teamed up with peace walkers to express their displeasure with violations of their civil rights, and nuclear weapons, through marching from Quebec to Cuba. Everyone wore the ps. Folk singer Pete Seeger joined in the activism. He said, “Songs are sneaky things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells.”

Read the photo-filled book to learn about numerous other people whose messaging helped spur the peace sign’s popularity through countless protests.

20 Years of Rolling Stone – BONUS POST

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Bonus Book of the Week is “20 Years of Rolling Stone, What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been” edited by Jann S. Wenner, published in 1987. This volume was comprised of some of the best articles from the magazine on its twentieth anniversary.

One contributing writer who always delivered rich, colorful prose was Hunter S. Thompson. In April 1972, he described his beef with America’s brand of leaders thusly: “…crowd pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage to whup their supporters to orgiastic frenzy, then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards to the Conglomerate Loan Company for a nickel apiece.”

In March 1975, Howard Kohn penned a serious piece (headlined “Malignant Giant”) about Karen Silkwood, a nuclear-power plant worker and whistleblower who tried to alert America to the dangers of radioactive substances such as plutonium. Sadly, her story is typical for this country, on the nuclear power conundrum. The author provided (scary!) information on the link between radiation– especially that emanating from plutonium– and CANCER:

lab animals have developed cancer from as little as a millionth of a grain of plutonium;

all people on earth would very nearly certainly develop cancer from a carefully dispersed softball-sized parcel of plutonium;

“Silkwood learned that several [workers] had no idea that plutonium could cause cancer.”

When airborne plutonium is inhaled, human lungs cannot be decontaminated.

The cancer rate among employees of Silkwood’s workplace was seven times higher than that of the population of the United States, according to the Denver Post at the time.

The article causes the reader to wonder what the real cancer rates are from the toxins to which everyone is unwittingly exposed on a daily basis (never mind power plants), not only in the U.S., but in Japan, China and France.

Anyway, read the book to learn about or nostalgically relive the era of (excuse the cliche) sex, drugs, and rock and roll of Wenner’s crowd, and see (uncensored!) photo spreads.

One for the Earth

The Book of the Week is “One for the Earth, Journal of A Sierra Club President” by Susan D. Merrow with Wanda A. Rickerby, published in 1992.

The Sierra Club, founded in May 1892, began with about one hundred members. Its original goal was to prevent the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California from becoming further polluted. Sadly, through the decades, the need for such an organization has grown exponentially. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, a group that began using the Club’s name, actually helped raise more funds than otherwise for the Club, but took public stances with which the original group disagreed.

Beginning in May 1990, Merrow was appointed president of the Club for a year’s term. She had acquired previous experience teaching adult education classes and lobbying the Connecticut state government on environmental matters. Her new job– for which she received no salary, only reimbursement of expenses– required constant travel. Volunteers did the bulk of the Club’s work. Her and her employer’s major frustration with the then-federal government was that it was regressive in connection with all kinds of energy issues.

The Club’s lobbyists were awfully busy contacting politicians about: incinerators, recycling, composting and source reduction, increasing gas mileage and decreasing emissions in newer cars, advocating for stopping oil drilling in the Arctic, reducing pollution on land and in the sea and in the air, and arguing for stricter waste-disposal laws, etc., etc., etc.

It might be recalled that a year prior, the Exxon Valdez oil spill left about 380,000 birds dead, and resulted in severe health issues for many animals and plants, including hundreds of species of mollusks, fish and coral-reef animals, dolphins and whales. The then-legal case that might compensate injured parties (Alaska and the United States) for the disaster was still pending. However, in April 1990, Exxon suggested that it pay $100 million to settle the civil and criminal charges against it. Tens of studies done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showed grievous (and probably irreparable) harm that (if a dollar value had to be put on it) was estimated at $1.1 billion.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, astute people knew that the Clean Air Act that was then working its way through the Congressional-passage process would become diluted by profiteers aided by propagandists. In autumn 1990, the Bryan Bill– mandating the manufacturing of more fuel-efficient cars– was stalled too, by lobbyists in the oil and auto industries, and by other presidential supporters.

The First Gulf War wreaked environmental destruction (now forgotten by Americans) consisting of “… soot from 600 burning oil wells… cloud over farmland and villages in Turkey and Iran… rain filled with toxic chemicals, polluted both the air and water. Severe respiratory illness, cancer, and ruined crops…”

On a diplomatic mission, the author visited staffers at three different magazines: Good Housekeeping, Sports Illustrated, and Seventeen. She hoped to get articles published for targeted readers of their respective, widely different demographic groups in whose interest it was to save the earth.

One concept the author conveyed was that protecting the habitat of one species, aids in the survival of all of the other species in that habitat. So ensuring a safe environment for the bobolink helps: “…lichens, apple trees, ladybugs, sumac, earthworms, chipmunks, monarch butterflies, white birches, wild blueberry bushes, goldenrod, red foxes– even humans.” The flip side is that one negative consequence leads to another when the food chain is disrupted (See this blog’s post, Rat Island).

Read the book to learn what happened to the Johnston-Wallop bill, and much more about the author’s trials, tribulations and triumphs.

A Long Way From Home – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “A Long Way From Home, Growing Up In the American Heartland” by Tom Brokaw, published in 2002.

Born in February 1940 in Webster South Dakota, Brokaw wrote of his first 22 years. He described the 1940’s and 1950’s Missouri-River infrastructure projects, among others, of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, whom his father assisted. Previously, all kinds of fish could be caught in the river.

Particularly noteworthy was the literal and figurative power the U.S. president possessed upon the 1953 completion of the flow-altering, water-corralling, energy-generating achievement: “President Eisenhower flipped a switch in the Oval Office to activate the eight turbines that, when powered by the focused force of the water, would transmit electricity to seven states.”

Additional curious information that represented the tenor of the times included the 1950’s South Dakota test of manhood handed down from father to son: pheasant hunting in wetlands, tall prairie grass, sorghum and cornfields.

Read the book to learn about many other cultural aspects of Brokaw’s childhood; a bygone era.

Uranium

The Book of the Week is “Uranium, War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World” by Tom Zoellner, published in 2009.

Now, as is well known, one element crucial for making an atomic bomb via the least difficult method, is uranium. It is radioactive– carcinogenic to humans. Without human intervention, an entire sample of it takes billions of years (yes, really, depending on the isotope) to break down into one substance after another, including thirteen heavy metals; ultimately lead.

In the early 1940’s, “The United States military moved quickly to squelch all news of radioactivity. There were worries in the Pentagon that the bomb would be compared to German mustard gas in WWI or other types of wartime atrocities.” Radiation sickness and cancer killed an estimated thirty thousand people in addition to the seventy thousand who perished instantly by the atomic bomb at Hiroshima in August 1945.

In the late 1940’s, radium– an element that helps make a nuclear weapon– was found to be harmful to humans. The (federal) Atomic Energy Commission gave regulatory responsibilities of health and safety to state agencies in Colorado, Arizona and Utah, making the excuse that private mining businesses were outside its jurisdiction. Of course, the states were understaffed and underfunded in regulating radium.

Nevertheless, the radium rush became a government-directed priority because it was a matter of national security. By the 1960’s, the greed was petering out, and Navajo country (in northern Arizona, and small regions of Utah and New Mexico) was a cancer cluster comprised of an eyesore of about thirteen hundred abandoned mines laid waste with radon gas. That was one aspect of the nuclear age. Another was that building fallout-shelters became trendy. The Kennedy family built one at their estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

In the mid-1950’s the “Atoms For Peace” program begun by president Dwight Eisenhower supplied nuclear reactors to Bangladesh, Algeria, Colombia, Jamaica, Ghana, Peru, Syria, Pakistan, Turkey, and Belgian Congo for the purpose of deterring the said countries’ enemies from using nuclear weapons against them.

In 1988, the United States supplied Iran with a five megawatt research reactor; China supplied uranium ore, and South Africa, a block of uranium and some plutonium. The Pakistani A.Q. Khan was hired as a scientific consultant.

Since 1993, the Atomic Energy Commission was supposed to have recorded incidents in which different forms of uranium (raw ore, yellowcake, hexafluoride, metal oxide, ceramic pellets, and fuel rod assemblies) have gone missing. Incident reportage works on the honor system. Unsurprisingly, the system hasn’t worked because the substance has a very complex, global black-market. Even so, the biggest hurdle to building a nuclear weapon is obtaining uranium in its highly enriched form. Then one must employ people with weapons-design and explosives expertise. Hiding the project (which in part, can be accomplished via a lead sleeve on the finished product– that would fool a radiation detector) might pose additional difficulties. It would cost a total of a few million (U.S.) dollars besides.

In the single-digit 2000’s, the author personally visited the country of Niger to see a uranium town for himself; a life-threatening trip. For, bandits or terrorists (likely of the Tuareg tribe who believe uranium mining has fostered inequality that adversely affects them economically, tribally and health-wise) appeared in front of his bus en route (a not uncommon occurrence). The bus driver was wise to the situation and drove away from the scene to a rural village with electricity, thanks to a nearby French power plant. The two main exports of Niger are uranium and onions. But the nation is still largely agricultural.

Read the book to learn much more about uranium in connection with: its sourcing in Australia, U.S. strategic interests in Soviet Georgia, Yemen’s goals, a Sierra Club legal fight, Vancouver’s ill-gotten gains, etc.

Ghosts of the Tsunami – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Ghosts of the Tsunami, Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone” by Richard Lloyd Parry, published in 2017.

As is well known, cancer cases will cluster among residents near even peacetime nuclear facilities that are working properly. Sadly, Japan’s poor foresight on its energy policy turned it into a boatload of misfortune waiting to happen.

In March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami in Japan reminded the world yet again how one disaster can lead to another, especially when it comes to the use of nuclear energy. After radioactivity (colorless and odorless) from its three melted-down nuclear reactors spread across Japan’s countryside, leaving a huge number of people sick and dead, it closed its remaining fifty reactors. Taking a lesson,–Germany, Italy and Switzerland stopped their nuclear energy programs.

The author, however, focused mostly on the no less traumatic deaths (some of them needless) and destruction in one small place, caused by the disasters. He spent an extensive amount of time corresponding with victims in the fishing village of Onagawa on the island of Honshu, where there occurred a large percentage of needless drownings at the local elementary school: 74 of 108 kids, and 10 of the 11 teachers.

The Kitakami river overflowed its banks, but school administrators failed to take precautionary measures to evade the flooding. “Within five minutes– the time it had taken them to evacuate their classrooms– the entire school could have ascended hundreds of feet above sea level, beyond the reach of any conceivable tsunami.”

Read the book to learn about the victims’ families’ quests for finding their loved ones and for the true details of how they died, and whether their deaths were preventable.