Memoirs of an Effort to Unlock the Mystery of Severe Storms - Tetsuya Theodore Fujita

Tornadoes are fascinating things. Living in the Midwest for my entire childhood, the sound of weekly tornado sirens was common. At least during the school year. Once we moved to the country, we weren't close enough to one to hear anything. Personally, I remember seeing one when I was pretty young, but it was pretty far away. When our kids were little, we also didn't have a siren close, so we relied on the radio/TV. The interesting thing about that was we lived very close to an elementary school. I never understood that. I remember taking the kids to the inner bathroom one night, but we were fortunate to never experience any damage.

Fujita was a fascinating character to me. He created the scale that we use to determine how destructive and deadly a tornado is. I wondered how he did that, so I wanted to read this memoir.

This was one of the strangest "memoirs" I've ever read. The first half of it reads like a meteorological paper. I was interested while he was talking about tornadoes (which surprised me), but when he started going into other weather phenomena, I was lost. There are tons of pictures, graphs and charts in there that I couldn't understand. I just skipped them.

About halfway through, the actual memoir of Fujita's life began. He talks about where he comes from, but he goes back and forth between his childhood and then referring to visits later on. There were a lot of pictures there, which I appreciated. Those were nice. Later on, Fujita goes back into weather topics, and I was lost again.

Shoutout to the very last page of the book. Fujita liked photography, but I never expected to see a full page of praying mantis pictures. That took me by surprise and made me smile. Other than that, there were bits and pieces of this I liked, but I don't think I'd call it a memoir. It feels like it's written for weather enthusiasts, and if you want to learn about Fujita as a person, you get a little glimpse of that here and there. An interesting man with an interesting journey into fame, but I wish it had focused more on the person and less on the weather.