El Nino in History: Storming Through the Ages

Cesar N. Caviedes's El Nino in History: Storming Through the Ages will attract the attention of armchair meteorologists and oceanographers everywhere, but particularly in those regions, such as Florida and California, where human life is most blatantly affected by weather. Drawing on his own and others' research, Caviedes (South America), professor and former chair of the University of Florida's Department of Geography, links current findings and speculation to 19th-century shipwrecks off Africa, successful European exploration of the Incan empire in the 16th century, WWI-era droughts in Australia, recent famines in countries in or adjacent to the Sahel and catastrophic floods in China in the 1400's. The book takes in a broader current than Mike Davis's recent, grimly magisterial Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. Tables and illus. (Sept.)