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Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
David Laskin was born in New York in 1953 and educated at Harvard College and New College, Oxford. He worked in the editorial department of Bantam Books before becoming a freelance writer. For the past several years, Laskin has written books and articles on a wide range of subjects, including history, weather, travel, gardens, and the natural world.
A frequent contributor to The New York Times Travel Section, Laskin also writes for the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, and Seattle Metropolitan. He and his wife, Kate O'Neill are the parents of three grown daughters and live in Seattle with their two sweet old dogs.
His works include The Parents Book for New Fathers, A Common Life: Four Generations of American Literary Friendship and Influence, The Reading Group Book, Rains All the Time: A Connoisseur's History of Weather in the Pacific Northwest, Artists in Their Gardens, Sasquatch Books, The Children's Blizzard, The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War, and The Family: Three Journeys into the Heart of the Twentieth Centurey.
His 2004 book, The Children's Blizzard, a national bestseller, won the Washington State Book Award and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and was nominated for a Quill Award.
David Laskin's website
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What exactly was the children's blizzard and why is it still remembered
today?
The event known as the school children's blizzard was a powerful winter
storm that swept down on the Upper Midwest on January 12, 1888. Even settlers
who had lived in the region for years insisted that they had never seen a
storm come down so quickly (many compared it to an explosion or a wall of
ice), drop temperatures so rapidly, and reduce visibility so dramatically. The
storm hit today's South Dakota (still part of the undivided Dakota Territory
at the time) and Nebraska in the middle of a school day (between 11 AM and 2
PM depending on location) -- and many frightened teachers dismissed their
one-room country schools. Hundreds of children become lost on the prairie on
their way home, hence the name the school children's blizzard.
How did you find the stories of individual families? Are there still
descendants of storm victims living in the region?
Families still talk about the 1888 blizzard to this day, and all who had
ancestors living in the region have family stories. Through local archives,
old newspapers, country cemeteries, ads in local papers, and plain old
networking ...
Rinker Buck began his career in journalism at the Berkshire Eagle and was a longtime staff writer for the Hartford Courant. He has written for Vanity Fair, New York, Life, and many other publications, and his work has won the... (more)
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Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of eight books, most recently The Immortal Irishman, a New York Times bestseller. His book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, won a National Book Award for ... (more)
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The Children's Blizzard
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by Timothy Egan
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