"Deeply researched, personal accounts of the Midwestern natural disaster whose ramifications can be felt today. Journalist Williams offers an eerily prescient work that comes in the wake of another storm of the century, Hurricane Sandy. In mid-March 1913, a series of tornadoes accompanied by a deluge of rain on saturated, thawing ground caused inordinate damage to a swath of Ohio and Indiana, impacting both neighboring states and those as far away as Vermont and New Jersey and leaving approximately 1,000 dead and untold damage to the heartland. Williams has delved into the archives and extracted the stories of survivors and many who perished, tragedies witnessed by many and recorded in newspapers, books and memories passed down. A well-honed chronicle of a significant national disaster, especially timely following the destruction of Sandy."

– Kirkus Reviews

"Williams weaves tragic and heroic stories of people in the various affected states into an almost hour-by-hour account of the deadly storm. This quick-reading history published for the storm’s centennial should interest readers who enjoyed Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm about the Galveston hurricane of 1900 or Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World about the San Francisco earthquake of 1906."

– Booklist