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Remember Laura Ingalls Wilders book The Long Winter, where they twisted straw for fuel and used the coffee grinder to make flour?
The Children's Blizzard is about the winter following that one. Its called the children's blizzard because so many of the people caught in it were kids, because they went to school in a lull in the storms that has been keeping them inside since the first snowfall in Octorber. There are three basic 'plots"
One deals with the Army's forcasting centers, the development of modern meterology, bureaucracy and the weather conditions that cause a blizzard.
The second deals with what happens when the body starts to freeze.
The third is about the people whose stories survive, immigrants from Norway and Russia, stories of surviving the blizzards by burrowing into haystacks, stories of kids gettting lost and freezing to death clutching their siblings within yards of shelter.
It jumps between the 3 plots, leaving a group of kids leaving the schools just as the blizzard strikes, to explaining what the forcasters were learing from the reports being telegraphed in from reporting stations throughout the prarie states, to the onset of hypothermia. Makes for some cliffhangers in a potentially textbookish subject.
I am going out to buy the boys good winter coats, boots, and snowpants asap.
The Children's Blizzard is about the winter following that one. Its called the children's blizzard because so many of the people caught in it were kids, because they went to school in a lull in the storms that has been keeping them inside since the first snowfall in Octorber. There are three basic 'plots"
One deals with the Army's forcasting centers, the development of modern meterology, bureaucracy and the weather conditions that cause a blizzard.
The second deals with what happens when the body starts to freeze.
The third is about the people whose stories survive, immigrants from Norway and Russia, stories of surviving the blizzards by burrowing into haystacks, stories of kids gettting lost and freezing to death clutching their siblings within yards of shelter.
It jumps between the 3 plots, leaving a group of kids leaving the schools just as the blizzard strikes, to explaining what the forcasters were learing from the reports being telegraphed in from reporting stations throughout the prarie states, to the onset of hypothermia. Makes for some cliffhangers in a potentially textbookish subject.
I am going out to buy the boys good winter coats, boots, and snowpants asap.
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