Hurricanes have had a profound and surprising impact on American history. Now, best-selling historian and author of Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates, Eric Jay Dolin returns to present a story on five hundred years of American hurricanes.

His latest book, A Furious Sky, spans centuries from the nameless storms that threatened Columbus’s New World voyages to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico three years ago. Dolin’s narrative is populated with unlikely heroes such as Benito Viñes, the 19th-century Jesuit priest whose methods for predicting hurricanes saved countless lives, and journalist Dan Rather, whose coverage of a 1961 hurricane would change broadcasting history. A necessary work of environmental and cultural history, A Furious Sky will change the way we understand the greatest storms on Earth, looming on the horizon of America’s future.