Dark Wind
A True Account Of Hurricane Gloria's Assault On Fire Island
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
September 25, 1985. The worst storm in half a century is headed towards the United States, her point of landfall--Fire Island, a narrow sandbar hugging the shore of Long Island. The East Coast is evacuated for hundreds of miles north and south, but on Fire Island itself, ten people refuse to leave.
In Dark Wind, a remarkable work of nonfiction, John Jiler tells the story of those people. A gay man with AIDS stayed behind because he had nothing left to lose. One pair of fiends tried to endure the storm with deep, meditative prayer; another trio, with a wild, chattering cocktail party. Also on the island lay the Sunken Forest, an ancient woods teeming with birds, plant, and animal life that was no less profoundly threatened by the power of Hurricane Gloria.
In this literary tour de force, Jiler combines the results of in-depth interviews with the survivors and detailed knowledge of the unique social and natural history of Fire Island to produce a panoramic account of nature in its inexplicable, sublime fury.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This unusual account of a storm offers a strange amalgam of the sublime and the silly, the significant and the trivial. In his first book, journalist/dramatist Jiler gives a virtually blow-by-blow account of events that transpired on September 25-26, 1985, when Hurricane Gloria, the worst in half a century, hit the narrow, elongated tract of land off Long Island's southern coast known as Fire Island. The author provides a splendid capsule history of Fire Island, including its development into a summer home for New York City's affluent homosexuals. His profiles of the 10 people, straight and gay, who refused to flee from Gloria to the mainland are also interesting, and he vividly depicts the storm's terrifying, capricious power. Less appealing is the author's tendency to anthropomorphize animals and birds, frequently to laughable extent. Nonetheless, anyone interested in Fire Island will enjoy his lively narrative. Photos not seen by PW .
