Steve Olson.
Eruption: the untild story of Mount St. Helens.
W.W. Norton. 2017
For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, and nearby residents
listened anxiously to rumblings from Mount St. Helens in southwestern Washington State.
Still, no one was prepared when a cataclysmic eruption blew the top off of the mountain,
laying waste to hundreds of square miles of land and killing fifty-seven people.
Steve Olson interweaves vivid personal stories with the history, science, and economic forces
that influenced the fates and futures of those around the volcano.
Eruption delivers a spell-binding narrative of an event
that changed the course of volcanic science,
and an epic tale of our fraught relationship with the natural world.