Showing results by narrator "Rick Foucheux" in All Categories

Most people associate storms and other big weather with death - with the kind of force that makes each of us wonder about life, time, and the nature of our surroundings. Some people go out looking for bad weather or go to places where they're likely to encounter it. Others have the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, the stories in Storm have more to say than that.

On October 29, 1991, the 70-foot longliner Andrea Gail, on day 40 of an extended commercial swordfishing trip, was lost in a convergence of three powerful storms off Canada’s Grand Banks. Data buoys measured waves as high as 100 feet, and the boat was hit with winds measuring 80 knots (92 miles per hour). The Andrea Gail’s emergency beacon washed ashore that November on Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, but the boat and 6-man crew were never found. The crew left behind five children among them, and the entire small town mourned the loss.

"In The Storm" is LeMoyne's personal account of the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in south Florida. The writer, with his wife, daughter, and sister-in-law, evacuated their apartment near downtown Miami and drove to a friend's concrete-block house about five miles inland. The worst of the storm struck just 10 miles farther south. In the end, Hurricane Andrew severely damaged 300 square miles, with about 100 square miles blasted or simply gone.

A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Louisiana Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young illiterate black man, is falsely convicted of murder and is sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, the plantation schoolteacher, agrees to talk with the condemned man. The two men forge a bond as they come to understand what it means to resist and defy one's fate.