More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
There was talk even of controlling the weather—of subduing hail with cannon blasts and igniting forest fires to bring rain. In this new age, nature itself seemed no great obstacle.
Hippocrates, who believed climate determined the character of men and nations.
By 1900, the city was reputed to have more millionaires per square mile than Newport, Rhode Island.
Within the next twenty-four hours, eight thousand men, women, and children in the city of Galveston would lose their lives. The city itself would lose its future. Isaac would suffer an unbearable loss. And he would wonder always if some of the blame did not belong to him.
when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself.
The trade winds blew. Great masses of air shifted without a sound. Somewhere, a butterfly opened its wings.
Lightning was barely understood, tornadoes not at all. To a boy in a land of ghosts and wild men, how could they not be alluring?
“I was twenty-one years old,” he wrote, “the world was before me and my enthusiasm was such that I thought I could do any thing that it was possible for man to accomplish.”
at a time when an ordinary man with patience and a knack for observation could change forever the way the world saw itself.
In this staunch, straight-backed time when a man could not weep and a woman could not smoke, there was always dancing.
“Time lost can never be recovered,” he said, “and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.”
