Eruption (Olson)

Eruption:  The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens
Steve Olson, 2016
W.W. Norton & Co.
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393242799


Summary
Survival narrative meets scientific, natural, and social history in the riveting story of a volcanic disaster.

For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, sightseers, and nearby residents listened anxiously to rumblings in Mount St. Helens, part of the chain of western volcanoes fueled by the 700-mile-long Cascadia fault.

Still, no one was prepared when an immense eruption took the top off of the mountain and laid waste to hundreds of square miles of verdant forests in southwestern Washington State.

The eruption was one of the largest in human history, deposited ash in eleven U.S. states and five Canadian provinces, and caused more than one billion dollars in damage. It killed fifty-seven people, some as far as thirteen miles away from the volcano’s summit.

Shedding new light on the cataclysm, author Steve Olson interweaves the history and science behind this event with page-turning accounts of what happened to those who lived and those who died.

Powerful economic and historical forces influenced the fates of those around the volcano that sunny Sunday morning, including the construction of the nation’s railroads, the harvest of a continent’s vast forests, and the protection of America’s treasured public lands. The eruption of Mount St. Helens revealed how the past is constantly present in the lives of us all.

At the same time, it transformed volcanic science, the study of environmental resilience, and, ultimately, our perceptions of what it will take to survive on an increasingly dangerous planet.

Rich with vivid personal stories of lumber tycoons, loggers, volcanologists, and conservationists, Eruption delivers a spellbinding narrative built from the testimonies of those closest to the disaster, and an epic tale of our fraught relationship with the natural world. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1956-57
• Where—San Diego, California, USA
• Raised—eastern Washington State
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Awards—Science-in-Society Award (National Association of Science Writers)
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington, USA


Steve Olson is a US writer who specializes in science, mathematics, and public policy. He is the author of a number of nonfiction trade books and has written for numerous magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, Science, Scientific American, Wired, Yale Alumni Magazine, Washingtonian, Slate, and Paste. His articles have been reprinted in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003 and 2007.

Books
2002 - Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins
2004 - Count Down: Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World’s Toughest Math Competition
2010 - Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion... (with Greg Graffin)
2016 - Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens

Mapping Human History was a finalist for the National Book Awards and received the Science-in-Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers. Count Down was named a best science book of 2004 by Discover magazine.

Research on Ancestry
Mapping Human History contained a conjecture about human ancestry that was disputed when the book was published. The book claimed that the most recent common ancestor of everyone living on the Earth today must have lived just 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, a number that geneticists thought much too small.

However, a more formal version of the conjecture was proven by the author, working with coauthors Douglas Rohde and Joseph Chang, in a September 30, 2004, article in Nature. Using a model of the world’s landmasses and populations with moderate levels of migration, the authors calculated that the most recent common ancestor could have lived as recently as AD 55.

These results lead to some highly counterintuitive conclusions. In the generations before that of the most recent common ancestor, more and more people are common ancestors of everyone living on Earth today. At a time 2,000 to 3,000 years before the appearance of the most recent common ancestor, everyone in the world is either an ancestor of everyone living today or an ancestor of no one living today. Thus, everyone living today has exactly the same set of ancestors who lived 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, even though those ancestors are represented in very different proportions on a person’s family tree.

Da Vinci Code
In an article published in the Los Angeles Times on the day the movie The Da Vinci Code was released, Olson pointed to several other consequences of the analysis in the Nature paper. If Jesus has any descendants living in the world today, then almost everyone in the world is descended from Jesus. Furthermore, if a person living today has four or five grandchildren, so that his or her genealogical lineage is unlikely to go extinct within a few generations, that person is virtually guaranteed to be an ancestor of all humans in the Universe who will be living 2,000 to 3,000 years from now.

Personal
Olson is married to Lynn Olson, a long-time education journalist who is currently a senior program officer with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They have two children, Sarah and Eric. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/17/2016.)

Book Reviews
Olson brings cinematic structure to descriptions of the events surrounding the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, finding in them a lesson for those tasked with mitigating the effects of future disasters.... ]A] detailed and human-centered look at a terrible disaster.
Publishers Weekly


A thoroughly sourced, compelling, and significant read.
Booklist


(Starred review.) [A]n engrossing explanation of volcanology during the 1980s and how the eruption of Mount St. Helens altered the prevailing science. He also...describes the political wrangling surrounding the status of the devastated area. A riveting trek combining enthralling nature writing with engaging social history.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Eruption...then take off on your own:

1. Why does Steve Olson insist that those who died when Mt. St. Helens exploded were not at fault? How did those people end up being left in harm's way? Was any one person to blame? Was it a systemic failure? Or was it simply a fateful chain of events?

2, Talk about the system of "red zones" and "blue Zones." How did they work (or not work)?

3. Why was the growing bulge on the side of Mount St. Helen's not given the significance it deserved? How much did scientists understand and how much was conveyed to the public?

4. How did the long history of the area—the railroad, the logging industry, land grants and public set asides—contribute to the confusion before and devastation during the eruption.

5. Discuss the explosion itself. What suprised you most?

6. How has the eruption of Mount St. Helens altered the scientific understanding of volcanoes, as well as the resilience of nature? 

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, feel free to use these, online or off, with attribution.)

top of page (summary)