In the course of his numerous talks and presentations to college and grade school students, civic clubs, and nursing homes, climatologist Randy Cerveny found that people of all ages are fascinated by the "unusual" -- and he seized on that fascination to tell them about strange weather. Now, in his first book, the rest of us can learn of real, documented stories such as these: Odd occurrences of chickens losing all their feathers during tornadoes (so-called "chicken plucking"); Strange stories of finding lightning victims who have been completely stripped of all of their clothes (through a process known as "the vapor effect"); Weird stories of how past powerful hailstorms have both led to the ending of one war -- and the complete prevention of another; Bizarre uses of weather -- such as the strange contraption called a "windwagon" that literally "sailed" nearly 500 miles from Kansas to Colorado; Each chapter in Freaks of the Storm encompasses the oddities of a specific type of weather, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, lightning, and hail. The author also divides specific conditions into a set of categories associated with the overall phenomena. In October 1947, in Marksville, Louisiana, hundreds of fish were falling from the sky. In November 1915, in Great Bend, Kansas, a tornado picked up five horses that landed unhurt a quarter mile from their barn. During a hurricane in 1938 along the eastern seaboard, residents discovered chickens with their feathers completely plucked by the wind. In Udall, Kansas, in 1955, a local barber was thrown out of bed, through a window, and into the street. He did not wake up. Cerveny, a professor who specializes in weather and climate, drew on his database of 8,000 recorded events to explain these occurrences. There are chapters on tornadoes, lightning, hail, rain, hurricanes, snow, wind, dust devils, and water spouts. He chronicles the oddest weather extremes (136 degrees in El Azizia, Libya, in 1922, and 129 below zero at the Russian research facility in Antarctica in 1983). The official world's record for a one-minute rainfall is 1.23 inches on July 4, 1956, in Avondale, Maryland. Cerveny's stories will captivate readers, or frighten them, or maybe a little of both. George Cohen Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved A contributing editor of the popular national weather magazine Weatherwise , Dr. Randy Cerveny is a professor who specializes in weather and climate at Arizona State University, where he is one of four professors out of a faculty of 1,700 honored with the title of "President's Professor." He has studied weather on all seven of the world's continents. His research has ranged from studying the weather associated with prison escapes to computing the weather of the next 10,000 years (used in the design of the nuclear waste depository at Yucca Mountain). For his research demonstrating that it rains more on weekends than on weekdays, the BBC, CNN, ABC News, NPR and others interviewed him, and he has appeared live on the NBC Today show and on the CBS Morning Show . His research has been discussed in such diverse publications as People, USA Today, National Geographic , and Sports Illustrated , and in numerous newspapers around the country, as well as in a recent documentary by the BBC. He is the author of over ninety technical articles on weather and climate in journals such as Science and Nature . Used Book in Good Condition