CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Foreword by Rick Bragg
Epigraph
Historic Tornado Outbreak Map
PART I: THE STORM
1. Racing the Storm
2. Trouble on the Horizon
3. The Calm
4. The Prelude
5. The Opening Act
6. Ground Truth
7. Scanning the Skies
8. Tornado Down
9. Birth of a Weatherman
10. Red-Letter Day
11. Unbroken
12. Chasers
13. Safe Place
14. Cordova
15. Code Gray
16. Entrapment
17. Slouching Toward Tuscaloosa
18. The Train
PART II: THE AFTERMATH
19. The Rescue
20. The Silence
21. Under Siege
22. The House
23. Charleston Square
24. Beverly Heights
25. Twilight
26. The Search
27. The Unthinkable
28. Graduation Day
29. The Walk
30. Chance
31. The Wake
PART III: THE RECOVERY
Tuscaloosa, Alabama Storm Fatalities
32. Picking Up the Pieces
33. But Not Destroyed
34. The Wedding
35. Healing
36. One Step at a Time
37. The Anniversary
38. Remembering
39. The Master
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About Kim Cross
In Memoriam
Memorial Scholarships
Index
Praise for What Stands in a Storm
“The writerly brilliance—the terse dark poetry—of this debut book explodes from every
page. Yet Kim Cross is too much of a writer to let mere masterful writing suffice. She has
enlisted her sentences in the service of her tremendous reportorial mission: to recover and
make sense of the thousands of fragmentary incidents, images, voices, and glimpses of
human character ennobled by loss and imminent death—the sum and substance of the
most catastrophic mass-tornado attack in recorded American history. This young writer has
done the impossible: she has out-written apocalypse. A new star has appeared in our
literary sky.”
—Ron Powers, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and coauthor of Flags of Our Fathers
“Amid so much terror and pain and death, there is an overflowing of life here in What
Stands in a Storm, gathered together in a blessing of uncommon decency and indelible
beauty. If you want to know what shape your heart’s in, read this book and learn, through
Kim Cross’s extraordinary reportage and artistry, that stories are as much a gift as life itself.
Stories, in fact, are our afterlife.”
—Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul
“Whether you live in tornado country or not, everyone should read this book.
Heartbreaking and heroic.”
—Fannie Flagg, author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe
“Turn off your cell phone. Call in sick. Tell your family whatever you need to tell them,
because you’re going to have to have eight hours of uninterrupted time once you begin Kim
Cross’s book. Her verbs pulsate, her narrative web sucks you in. Mostly, Cross makes you
care about the people in What Stands in a Storm, their quirks and aspirations. You won’t
look at a coiling sky the same way after reading this powerhouse debut.”
—Beth Macy, New York Times bestselling author of Factory Man
“What Stands in a Storm is a dramatic and carefully reconstructed account of nature’s
unexpected and explosive power and the strength of humans to bond together in its
destructive wake.”
—Peter Stark, author of Astoria and The Last Empty Places
“With exhaustive, on-the-ground reporting, spellbinding prose and voices of the living and
the dead recounting every haunting moment of the storm’s three-day reign of terror, Kim
Cross has produced a spine-chilling narrative. What Stands in a Storm will tear apart,
forever, our complacent sense of security when we look at a dark sky overhead.”
—George Getschow, writer-in-residence, The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction
Conference
“A powerful book, unforgettable in its recreation of a horror that swallowed entire
“A powerful book, unforgettable in its recreation of a horror that swallowed entire
communities. Kim Cross brings to life the soul-searing experience of people standing
prostrate as a monstrous storm tears their lives to shreds. But there is joy in this horror. She
shows us how ordinary people in the worst-hit areas discovered what they and their
communities were made of as the sky fell around them.”
—Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump
