Category Archives: book reviews

The Monday Book – Without Warning by Jim Minick

Posted on by
1

            This week, we hear from Jim Minick himself as he shares the journey of writing his newest book…

On May 25th, 1955, an F5 tornado struck Udall, Kansas at 10:35 PM. There was no warning. In roughly three minutes, it destroyed most of the buildings, toppled the water tower, and killed 82 people. The Udall tornado was—and still is—the worst in the history of Kansas, and one of the worst in U.S. history.

            In May of 2011, I started interviewing survivors of this tornado, thus beginning a twelve-year-long journey to create the book Without Warning. Quickly, I learned what I had hoped to make into a novel would not work as fiction. The survivor stories were so powerful that the book had to be nonfiction; that was the only way to honor these people and their stories.

            If I wasn’t writing fiction, I still had to imagine my way into this story. I had to become an authority on the material before I could become the author. And then I had to make the story live inside me so that it would then live inside every reader. That was not easy. In many ways, this book is not my story. I didn’t grow up in this town, never lived in Kansas, never witnessed a tornado. And yet, to make the story work, I had to live it. I had to imagine my way into these people’s lives as they crawled over rubble to find help or as they took on the monumental task of rebuilding.

            In other words, to make it nonfiction, I still had to use great amounts of imagination, but all of that had to be grounded in what actually happened. So in addition to hundreds of hours of interviews, the book is also based on extensive research of the newspaper accounts from that time. And then, when possible, which was most of the time, I shared what I wrote, what I imagined, with the survivors. I wanted them to see what I was doing with their stories, and I wanted them to say, yes, that’s right.

            Thankfully, the years of labor proved worthwhile. The book has found a large audience, including the hundreds of people who still call Udall home. On the 68th anniversary of the tornado, I gave a reading in the town’s Community Building, and the standing-room-only crowd was grateful to finally have their story captured for others to read, including the generations to come.

More Interviews with Jim Minick on Without Warning:

The Monday Book – A Place Called Home by David Ambrosz

Posted on by
Reply

Guest review by Janelle Bailey, retired Literature teacher.

As soon as I began reading I felt this, “Gosh, I’ve read this story before” feeling and immediately connected to two different books I’d read at two very different, distant from each other times, in my life but with similar subjects: poverty and foster care, here combined. I thought of Jeanette Walls’s The Glass Castle in terms of poverty and Steve Pendleton’s A Chance in the World in terms of foster care…and here they were, both authors, blurbing this book on the back when I flipped it over.

Different from the two of them, however: no immediate assurance from the start that it all, somehow, turns out okay. Walls’s and Pendleton’s books each begin with an end that provides reassurance that it all, ultimately and somehow, after I complete my reading of the 300-ish pages, turns out with them each in an okay place. This book does not provide that same reassurance from Ambrosz. I find myself continually flipping to the inside back cover to his author photograph, which presents that reassurance in a slight smile, suggesting that he, too, comes out of it all–this, which I read with challenge and pain, much of it–okay, or at least better than he is while enduring it all.

And while in some ways David Ambrosz’s story is similar to theirs, albeit with a combination main course of poverty and terrible foster care, and added sides of single parent with mental illness and being gay in an anti-LGBTQ+ (not even the acronym, yet, then) world, his challenges are individually special and his own, even though he endures what others similarly have.

Ambrosz is a storyteller who takes us along on his difficult journey and allows us to endure the difficulties and pain with him but also to feel the hope he shares for a better future for himself and others AND the gains he makes in small and large ways to find himself and become a confident and stable and strong self, ultimately.

I’ll need to do further research into the legislation for which he’s worked and pushed, to see what’s come of it all. But I am happy to have met him here and know so much more about him and his story. This is an enlightening and eye-opening–valuable–read.