List of Illustrations
Author’s Note
1. What Used to Be
2. The Weight of It
3. What the Lightning Revealed
4. Hit by Emptiness
5. Something Shifted Inside
6. Bigness of Heart
7. People Will Return
8. Overwhelmed
9. So Many Dead
10. Distributing Kindness
11. The Long Process of Working Through
12. Something to Hold Onto
13. The Smoke of What Used to Be
14. Trying to Find Normal
15. Marching On
16. Everybody Deserves a Picture
17. Remembering
18. The People Moving Forward
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Bibliographic Essay
Jim Minick is the author or editor of seven books, including the award-winning Fire Is Your Water and The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Poets and Writers, Oxford American, Orion, and Shenandoah.
"Without Warning can serve as primary source material for further
study of the tornado and could be of interest to collections on
Kansas history and natural disaster narratives."—C. A.
Sproles, Choice
"Without Warning is a significant addition to disaster history,
serving as a strong case study of a singular event and highlighting
the importance of oral histories and archival research in disaster
studies."—Norah Schneider, H-Environment
"For anyone of us who has lost faith in America and its basic sense
of seeking the common good, Without Warning is a reminder that
regardless of our political leanings, we pull together during times
of great crisis and need. Udall, Kansas stands as a shining
example."—John Newlin, New York Journal of Books
"More than a fascinating and emotional read . . . [Without
Warning] offers a guide for enduring disasters yet to
come."—Michael Ray Taylor, chapter16.org
“A time capsule of rural American lives and a testament to the
tenacity and grit of the human spirit, Without Warning captures a
community before, during, and after one of the most devastating
natural disasters in our nation’s history. This is a story of loss
and despair, resilience and hope, all rendered stunningly by prose
deeply measured and tightly wrought. Minick is a master of the
form.”—David Joy, author of When These Mountains Burn
“Without Warning is a page-turning disaster narrative in the
tradition of The Perfect Storm and Isaac’s Storm: spare, vivid,
suspenseful, meticulously researched, and utterly harrowing. But
the havoc an F5 tornado wrecked on this quintessential Kansas small
town in the spring of 1955 is only part of the story here. By
taking the arc all the way from the calm before the storm to the
months-long labor of rebuilding and reanimating, Jim Minick has
brought an entire community lovingly to life. At heart, this is a
book about how what’s best about our country confronts and
overcomes the worst of our weather.”—David Laskin, author of The
Children’s Blizzard
“Without Warning is a vivid testimony to why modern-day weather
forecasting deeply matters, especially to those so often in the
path of these dangerous storms. But it is also a story of
resiliency—a portrait of people and a town that lost almost
everything but somehow found the strength to go on. It’s only
through the stories of survivors that we can try to comprehend the
precarious nature of tornadoes and prepare as much as one can for a
phenomenon that is still so violently unpredictable.”—Holly Bailey,
author of The Mercy of the Sky
“Jim Minick turns anecdote into story, and story into the personal
history of an American town, a town that represents a blueprint for
responding to other natural crises. The images are often
haunting—the ding-ding, ding-ding of a railway crossing bell, lost
photos found in a pasture ten miles away, a “mountainous grave” of
debris. Twelve years of interviews and research accompany this
work, allowing the author the time it takes to become familiar with
people—in some sense, a neighbor. Minick wants us to witness the
resilience, generosity, kindness, and capacity for change that the
storm broke loose that day, amid all its terrible destruction. His
hopeful voice is one worth listening to—from the book’s beginning
to the wonderful epilogue that concludes it.” —Joyce Dyer, author
of Pursuing John Brown: On the Trail of a Radical Abolitionist
“This is vivid, compelling narrative history with the detail,
tension, and pacing of fiction, meaning it’s hard to put down.
Though I’ve never been to Udall, Kansas, I feel as if I visited in
1955 and met the residents. Their stories are ones we’re all going
to need more than ever. If catastrophe strikes us like it did
Udall, the big question is going to be, how well will we survive as
a community?”—David L. Bristow, author of Nebraska History Moments
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