Timely Book Helps To Explain Chaotic Weather

David Laskin is almost embarrassed to admit that just about the only thing he watches on TV is The Weather Channel. “My wife thinks I’m slightly cracked,” he said.

As the “Blizzard of ‘96” hammered the East Coast, Laskin, 42, was glued to the media coverage at home in sunny Seattle. Relatives and friends who knew of what he calls “my abnormal interest and obsession with the weather” phoned him from across the country to tell of the snowdrifts mounting outside their doors.

As if this weren’t enough luck for a weather buff, Laskin has an impeccably timed book that seeks to explain the country’s calamitous weather and how it has shaped the national character. In “Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather,” newly published by Doubleday, he describes weather as “the classic example of chaos at work” and details the increasingly complex efforts to forecast conditions with greater accuracy.

In addition, Laskin offers his own engaging views about how the mass media have heightened our interest in weather during the past two decades. The Weather Channel (“It makes you feel as if there is nothing going on in the world but weather”) was once dismissed as a cable-TV joke, but now is watched in nearly 200,000 households at any given time.