Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938

On the morning of September 21, 1938, the swath of coastline from Cape May to Cape Cod was the wealthiest and most populous in the world. By evening, it was a wasteland. Racing up the Atlantic Coast, the storm reached New York and New England ahead of hurricane warnings and struck with such intensity that it registered on seismographs in Alaska. Winds clocked at 186 miles per hour stripped cars of their paint. Walls of water fifty feet high swept homes and entire families out to sea. Drawing on newspaper accounts, survivors' testimony, and archival sources, R. A. Scotti has written an unforgettable account of an ocean rising up to wreak total destruction on a way of life the world would never see again. Book jacket.