"David Laskin deployshistorical fact of the finest grain to tell the story of a monstrous blizzardthat caught the settlers of the Great Plains utterly by surprise. . . . This is abook best read with a fire roaring in the hearth and a blanket and box oftissues near at hand." -- Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City"Heartbreaking. . . . This account of the 1888 blizzard reads like a thriller." -- Entertainment WeeklyThegripping true story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newlyarrived settlers and cast a shadow on the promise of the American frontier.January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonablywarm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mildthat children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the airwas calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-forcewinds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through thecenter of the continent.By the next morning, some five hundred peoplelay dead on the drifted prairie, many of them children who had perished ontheir way home from country schools. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes ofthe pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harshenvironment. Recent immigrants from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and the Ukrainelearned that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgivingplace governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled.With the storm as its dramatic, heartbreakingfocal point, The Children's Blizzard capturesthis pivotal moment in American history by tracing the stories of five familieswho were forever changed that day. David Laskin has produced a masterfulportrait of a tragic crucible in the settlement of the American heartland. The P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insightsinto the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.