Earth?s treacherous energies are tracked in this informative primer on natural disasters which surveys a slew of spectacular cataclysms?the Tohoku earthquake, superstorm Sandy, tornadoes, volcanoes, floods, droughts, even a Martian landslide. Kieffer adroitly explains these phenomena with homespun analogies to exploding bicycle tires, ripples in a kitchen sink, and the like, and recalls her unruffled firsthand glimpses of the Mount St. Helens eruption and other disasters. There?s not a huge conceptual payoff to her grand unified theory of disasters; the particular details of how they go about devastating the world in their separate, idiosyncratic ways are more captivating than the common physical laws that underlie the mayhem.
