Published in 1941, [Storm] follows the life of a winter storm from its birth over the North Pacific until its dissipation twelve days later. The storm, privately named "Maria" by a junior meteorologist at the San Francisco office of the US Weather Bureau, is a significant enough presence in the story to qualify as a character . . . except that Stewart, even as he lovingly chronicles its growth and changing nature, is careful never to humanize it. It sweeps across the Pacific, then across Northern California, utterly indifferent to its effect on the human characters in the story.

Those human characters are, by traditional literary standards, given only slightly more development. They have character traits and motivations, both limited in number and very sparely drawn, but not personalities. Over the course of the story, we see them almost exclusively in the context of doing their jobs, and learn virtually nothing about their larger lives or inner thoughts and emotions.

All of this serves the central theme of Stewart's novel, which is the collision of natural systems (the storm) and the human systems that it touches: the weather bureau, the airlines and railroads, the power and telephone companies, the flood-control works that regulate the flow of the rivers, and the highway department charged with keeping the mountain roads over the Sierra Nevada open and passable. The drama in the story lies in the humans who operate these systems straining their minds, bodies, and spirits to the breaking point to keep them operating in spite of the storm . . . or at least to keep its disruption of them, and thus its effect on people's lives, to an absolute minimum.

Stewart's writing about atmospheric phenomena, though it occasionally tips into the self-consciously grandiose, remains surprisingly gripping, and his juggling of multiple plot lines and sets of characters is masterful. It's a thoughtful reflection on the way that fragility and resilience coexist in the technological systems that make modern life possible. It's also a look into the minds of the workers whose unseen labor (both physical and mental) keeps those systems operating.

[Storm] not an easy sell to someone you don't know well, but if anything I wrote above intrigues you, it's well worth tracking down. ( )

The people are examples, generic, but each one shows how this great weather event affected many others like them. I read this many times over many years, and still felt it was new each reading. ( )

Outstanding. A description of the birth of a storm and then its progress over 12 days. A wide variety of situations and people are involved. Each are introduced early in the book, but in many cases their significance does not become clear until later. Stewart is a master of describing a chain of events - two boys who shoot an electrical box on a pole which later lets the rain in and shorts the circuitry, disabling pumps and flooding an underpass. Or a tree that fell many years before and eventually slides off a rocky edge and brings down a phone line, disrupting a call. Or an owl that gets electrocuted on a power line, causing a weakness in the cable that later fails under the weight of ice from the storm.
As others have noted, descriptions of life in California in 1941 are fascinating, including the human skill that was involved in interpreting weather charts and producing a forecast. ( )

Follows a Pacific storm from it's inception off the coast of Japan to a several day wallop of California. Set in the present day of 1941, we follow the impact of the storm from the Weather Service to the railroad, air service, US 40 over Donner Pass, and Army Corps of Engineers Sacramento office. There is a wayward owl and lineman, blown down tree, and lineman as well.

Really happy to stumble across. ( )

12 days. A storm arises, crosses the Pacific, hits California ending a drought. The people who watch it and are responsible for dealing with its consequences in the Weather Bureau, highways, power, telephone, railroad, water management and air control are followed as well, but while the storm is named, Maria, only a few of the people are, and those whose inner workings are described as well as most others are referred to by job title often just initials. ( )