Recent Books by David Laskin
The Children’s Blizzard
An award-winning perennial favorite, The Children’s Blizzard is the true story of an epic winter storm that hit the Upper Midwest on January 12, 1888. Some 500 people, many of them children on their way home from one-room school houses, died of exposure and frostbite as a result of the blizzard. Laskin unfolds this epic event by focusing on half a dozen families – pioneers who had emigrated to the prairie from Germany, Norway, and New England in search of free land and better lives, only to find themselves and their children at the mercy of a blizzard of unprecedented suddenness and ferocity. Hailed by the Washington Post as “a vital addition to the lore of Western immigrant pioneering,” this national bestseller has sold over 100,000 copies and has been adopted in history and literature classes in high schools and colleges nationwide.
Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather
This cultural history of North American weather begins with the arrival of humans over the land bridge that connected Alaska and Siberia during the last ice age and ends with The Weather Channel. In between, Laskin covers how weather has influenced and interacted with American science, religion, war, politics, entertainment and news media. “Laskin has pulled off an amazing feat,” reports The Washington Post, “putting together a densely researched, fast-moving chronology…fascinating.”
Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal among the New York Intellectuals
The writers associated with the Partisan Review, including Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Diana and Lionel Trilling, and Hannah Arendt, were among the most brilliant – and contentious – intellectuals in American history. In this brilliant, sharply opinionated book, Laskin delves into the intersection between the privates lives, politics and literary creations of this intense circle. Winner of the Washington State Book Award, Partisans brings to life an era when literature was at the center of our culture – and writers lived lives of passionate often self-destructive intensity.
Recent Articles by David Laskin
On Hallowed Ground, a Place of Painful Beauty, The New York Times
Article on Visiting the Argonne Battlefields of France
When History Speaks, The New York Times
Article about tracing family history in Israel
The Most Treacherous Terrain, Seattle Met
Article about the Northwest Avalanche Center