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These are books I highly recommend for those interested in risk, climate, weather, or the intersection of those topics. If you enjoy any of these, just e-mail russell.martin@wdn.com for recommendations of additional titles on similar topics.

There are two qualitative statistical principles that anyone can learn that will help them deal with risk, and they are presented in these two books: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and the Markets and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, both by Nissam Nicholas Taleb. If various people in positions of responsibility would have read and heeded the messages in these books, an almost incalculable amount of trouble could have been avoided in recent years.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan - Pulitzer Prize winning author Egan won a National Book Award for this history of the Dust Bowl.

Locust by Jeffery A. Lockwood - This book suggests that man may have unknowingly triggered the demise of the locust which had done its best to prevent man from establishing himself on the Great Plains of the United States. It is a fascinating combination of history and scientific detective story.

Although it does not cover the past 25 years, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner is an excellent history of the development of the American West and how it shaped and was shaped by the exploitation of limited water resources. The resulting population distribution is too short-sighted for words.

Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization by Steven Solomon discusses water, its availability and uses, and how those aspects have influenced mankind’s history and will probably influence mankind’s future in upcoming decades. He takes an integrated historical and economic view to show how water, not only for drinking and producing food but also for transportation, power, sanitation, and as an input to industrial production, has been key to the rise and fall of great civilizations throughout history and to this day. Up to date and very readable, it is 500 pages long, but the subject certainly merits a treatment of that length.

In recent years wildfires have become larger and more frequent, in part due to droughts and increasing insect damage, the latter partly due to warmer winters. They have also become more dangerous due to the expansion of human hibitation into forest lands. The archetypal story of the fight against a forest fire is Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, a National Book Critics Circle Award winning book.

In his lastest book, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America, Pulitzer Prize winning author Timothy Egan explores the early days of the Forest Service and the tragic blaze which help create the mythos at the foundation of the organization still today.

Familiar to many PBS viewers, David McCullough (twice a Pulitzer Prize winner and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom) choose The Johnstown Flood as the subject for his first, and critically acclaimed, book. It could be subtitled "Anatomy of a Disaster" for its description of the causes of the flood, but it is a much bigger story of life and death.

A Watershed Year: Anatomy of the Iowa Floods of 2008 by Cornelia F. Mutel (ed.) is a readable collection of contributions from many experts on the numerous aspects of the disastrous 2008 floods in my home state, Iowa. During the flood I saw TV coverage from where I went to college, Cedar Rapids, which simply astonished me even though I was familiar with the huge 1993 Midwest floods. The book covers a broad range of topics, many of which the layperson might not realize exist, from the development of preexisting conditions for floods, how the timing of basin scale rain events can exacerbate floods, and how land use practices have change flood vulnerability to what we learned from the 1993 floods and have yet to implement to mitigate future, inevitable, floods.

Although far more an a flood only, much of the destruction from Hurricane Katrina was due to predictable, and predicted, flooding. The Storm, by Ivor van Heerden and Mike Bryan, recounts the accurate predictions, the hurricane, and the derelictions of duty which helped delineate the eventual disaster.

Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson is the story of the 1900 hurricane that destroyed Galveston, Texas, killing an estimated 6,000 to 12,000 people, and the struggle of the early Weather Service and its meteorologists to deal with the problems of forecasting such storms.

Tornado: Accounts of Tornadoes in Iowa by John Stanford is a small, well-illustrated book filled with stories of significant tornadoes in Iowa. The author was my research advisor and one of my photos of the F5 Jordan tornado is in the second edition.

Although still very dangerous, these days winter storms are often more of an inconvenience than a threat to life. The threat was much greater in the past, as related in The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin. In one of the fastest and most extreme weather changes ever recorded on the Great Plains, over 100 children, caught unprepared, were killed in a day.

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