In The Distancers, seven generations worth of joy and heartache is artfully forged into a family portrait that is at once universally American yet singularly Lee Sandlin's own. From the nineteenth century German immigrants who settled on a small Midwestern farm, to the proud and upright aunts and uncles with whom Sandlin spent the summers of his youth, a whole history of quiet ambition and stoic pride--of successes, failures, and above all endurance--leaps off the page in a sweeping American family epic. Touching on The Great Depression, WWII, and the American immigrant experience, the uses of proper manners, The Distancers is a beautiful and stark Midwestern drama, about a time and place long since vanished, where the author learned the value of family and the art of keeping one's distance.
Isaac's Storm meets The Age of Wonder in Lee Sandlin's Storm Kings, a riveting tale of the weather's most vicious monster'the super cell tornado'that recreates the origins of meteorology, and the quirky, pioneering, weather-obsessed scientists who helped change America.
Acclaimed journalist and author Lee Sandlin delivers a riveting glimpse of a dangerous and colorful place in America's historical landscape'the Mississippi River of the 19th century. Long before it was dredged into a shipping channel or romanticized into myth, the untamed Mississippi'the lifeblood of communities that rose and fell along its banks'spawned a motley array of pirates and dignitaries, visionaries and thieves.
