This book didn't know what it wanted to be when it grew up. The author obviously did a lot of research, but he had difficulty focusing the mission of the book and selectively highlighting the characters, anecdotes and information that would have made the blizzard of 1888 real to the reader. Instead, the reader (this one, at least) was buried under a blizzard of facts, character sketches, and historical information with tenuous connection to the subject. It was informative, but I could have gotten the same information much more concisely from Wikipedia.