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 enlarge | Authors: Art Bell, Whitley Strieber
Publisher: Pocket Star
Category: Book
List Price: $6.99
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Rating:  145 reviews
Sales Rank: 51900
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 6.6 x 4.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0743470656
Dewey Decimal Number: 551.6
EAN: 9780743470650
ASIN: 0743470656
Publication Date: April 27, 2004
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| Customer Reviews:
 Half twisted science , half disaster science fiction February 27, 2007
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
Strangely enough they get some of it right, but like Hitler's lies about the Jews: every big lie has a foundation in some ordinary truth.
It does appear that rapid climate changes are upon us.
Will they produce sudden climate changes like the ones in this book?
It doesn't seem to likely. It might be preferable to the other runaway
train alternative where the CO2 build up continues until the earth turns in to another Venus. In either case the government may sometime later decide to try to do something besides give tax breaks to car companies and oil companies.
I can't say that scaring the pants off people is a very good idea either, but calling their attention as AL Gore has done is a good idea.
People should just get it right without ancient civilizations and
cataclysms that have consistently been proved to be wrong interpretations of the data.
 More New Age Nonsense February 19, 2007
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
This book is not a thesis, a university textbook, or a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, so don't expect it to read like one -- but what else would you expect from two radio talk show sensationalists whose specialty is to shock people with credulous storytales of the supernatural or paranormal? The Coming Global Superstorm is a "non-fictional" horror story about the sudden end of the world as we know it. That is so original...not! It makes for sensationalist reading that will keep you hanging onto the edge of your seat, but it will not educate you with any facts or logic. Their idea of "science" only consists of anecdotes and how the authors personally interpret those anecdotes. For example, a few frozen mammoths have been found frozen in mid-chew, so the authors quickly jump to conclusions and interpret this as proof of a sudden worldwide global freeze, instead of the more reasonable and documented sudden localized freezing. The "evidence" presented in each chapter explains nothing scientifically, so it is left up to your imagination to fill in the blanks. For example, nowhere does the book teach anything about how the climate works, it is just assumed that whichever way it works, it will somehow magically work whatever they tell you it will work. A great example of this is their the Earth's climate is like a rubber band "theory". That is such a nice visual but it explains absolutely nothing about how the Earth's climate "works like a rubber band". It is just a bunch of pseudoscientific fast food all wrapped up with pretty words and a pretty cover that makes for a quick read, but will just as quickly leave you hungering for something more intellectually stimulating and grounded in real life than this New Age nonsense.
What if . . . September 24, 2006
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
There was a terrible movie, The Day After Tomorrow, made based on this book. Trust me, it's not the book's fault. The proposal here is that the rising water temperatures of the North Atlantic shuts down the circulation effect which brings cool water to the equatorial regions causing global weather patterns to go haywire. Then, as a result, a single storm circles the planet spinning off hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis and blizzards. The archeological record supports such a catastrophe sometime in the earth's past and it's proposed that the flood myth might stem from such a system. Fantastic premise for an adequate book.
 scary genius June 14, 2006
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
Read this, and realize the immediacy of the problem. Even if mankind isn't causing these cycles, they're happening. Art Bell = genius.
It Make You Think: What If? February 16, 2006
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
Some years ago my schedule was such that I was regularly driving in the car late at night, and after being disappointed by most of the available programming, I discovered the "After Dark" radio show, hosted by Art Bell. Of course any show focusing on the unexplained and the paranormal has to involve talking to some crackpots, but for me what outweighed that disadvantage was the show's varied and interesting contemplation of that tantalizing question, "What if?"
I first heard about the book "The Coming Global Superstorm" when Mr. Bell mentioned it on the show, also citing some new meteorological evidence supporting the claims made in the book. After seeing it displayed in a local bookstore, I bought a copy and soon had trouble putting it down.
The subject of the book, not surprisingly, is the speculative phenomenon known as a "Superstorm," which Mr. Bell and his co-author, Whitley Strieber, propose to have occurred in Earth's distant past, perhaps more than once. Though the evidence for this is a bit spotty and involves a fair bit of speculation, I still found it fascinating to think about the possibility of such a storm and what it would do to life as we know it. The book makes clever use of the unexplained to bolster its case, as one might expect from two minds that deal regularly with the fringes of what humans understand. Whatever might be said about the plausibility of the Superstorm, I thought the authors did a fantastic job of tying together seemingingly unrelated phenomena into a believable explanation.
Below are just a few of the interesting "what if?" questions posed in the book:
* What if the Zodiac we know as a rudimentary tool for predicting our daily lives were just a remnant of a much more powerful system of explaining and predicting events on Earth, based on cycles that repeat every 26,000 years?
* Frozen, fossilized mammoths have been found in Siberia with undigested food in their stomachs, their mouths still full of food, the mammoths seemingly having been frozen in mid-chew. No currently-known process could have cooled them fast enough to preserve them in such a state. Whatever killed them, why didn't they have time to react or to run away? What if the process that preserved them was the sudden onset of a Superstorm?
* Since the joining of North and South America through plate tectonics, what has been the effect on the weather of the Earth? Could it be that the weather systems set up by this nearly Earth-wide barrier give rise to Superstorms?
"The Coming Global Superstorm" is presented in a "split" format, alternating chapters written by Mr. Bell with those by Dr. Strieber. Mr. Bell's chapters lay out an example scenario following scientists and other characters as the hypothetical Superstorm develops and devastates the civilized world. Dr. Strieber's chapters lay out the argument for the possibility that such storms occurred in Earth's past, and the warning that such a storm may be coming in our future. I found this mixed format made for a compelling read, since the experiential narrative of Mr. Bell's chapters was especially effective in adding a human element to Dr. Strieber's explanatory chapters.
Overall a book worth reading and an idea worth thinking about, whether you're convinced it could really ever happen or not.
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