DISCOVERIES

Big Weather

Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America

Mark Svenvold

Henry Holt: 304 pp., $26

“Every tornado,” writes weather watcher and poet Mark Svenvold, “represents a supreme, if momentary, trouncing of the second law of thermodynamics, the glum law of entropy that states that all things move from order to chaos.” Welcome to the world of “storm chasers,” “weather dweebs,” characters who argue with the Weather Channel, “a certain type of social misfit” devoted to calculating “God’s next move” -- men and women with “eyes like saucers” who are, as people used to say, “tetched in the head.” Be prepared to learn their language. Be prepared to be awed by what they see. Be prepared to be thrilled by Svenvold’s funny, elegant descriptions of both the storms and this strange species he has dubbed Meteorologica vagabonda expatrius.

Svenvold got the bug in the spring of 2000, when he saw his first tornado while driving across Oklahoma. America’s midsection receives three-quarters of the world’s tornadoes (including the dreaded F5s and capricious, violent F4s). Oklahomans, Svenvold notes, exhibit a “nonchalance lassoed to an ethos straight from the oil fields, an indifference to the concept of harm, an impatience with anything that smacked of self-preservation, a tendency to view issues of safety or health as the preoccupations of wussyboy easterners.”

Svenvold distinguishes the real storm chasers from the “Jethros,” mere bumpkin-esque thrill seekers with none of the expertise, not to mention the equipment. Threat maps, the Fujita scale, isobaric charts, MMS printouts, millibars, supercells, low-level shear and the perils of being “yevtushenkoed” (repeatedly put off by unwilling interviewees) -- all this will be explained in language that veers toward the biblical but pulls back from the edge just in time. Svenvold watches as his storm chasers exhibit the “serene awareness” required for their work; he meets kids who map human behavior for counterterrorist units at Los Alamos and do storm chasing on the side to relax. In Wakita, Okla., where the eponymous 1996 disaster movie was filmed, he visits the Twister Museum, “the sort of place that tried to screen off its loneliness in the universe with a veil of kitsch.” To Svenvold, the weather is “the social equivalent of the sympathetic nervous system,” and a tornado is “a holy terror of unfixed address,” inspiring “arm-swinging hyperbole” in weathermen, storm chasers and even, now and then, awed authors.

*

Death and the Sun

A Matador’s Season in the Heart of Spain

Edward Lewine

Houghton Mifflin: 245 pp., $24

Francisco Rivera Ordonez, 28, is a matador; a son, grandson and great-grandson of Spain’s most famous matadors; and “a prince of bullfighting from birth.” Rivera Ordonez’s ancestors are the men that Hemingway wrote about in “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Dangerous Summer.”

Edward Lewine follows Rivera Ordonez through a season -- February to October -- in the ferias and corridas of Valencia, Cordoba, Tolosa, Seville and Ronda, with their different audiences and expectations. When the book opens, Rivera Ordonez’s marriage to the daughter of the 18th duchess of Alba has just ended; his grandfather, who was also his mentor, has died; and his career is deteriorating. He has failed, writes a predatory press that regards its bullfighters as national heroes, to rise from his original roughness, his youthful promise, to a more classical style. And he has problems with the kill. Lewine is witness to Rivera Ordonez’s struggle to pull himself up, practicing the traditional passes with the muleta and the capote, perfecting the stillness and intensity of the art form -- los tres tercios, the three acts of the bullfight. In the book’s final chapter, the author recommends the corridas (Madrid, Valencia, Almeria, Logrono) worth seeing.

“This is not,” Lewine cautions in a prefatory note, “a book of moral philosophy. It does not tell the reader how the world should be. This is a book of journalism. It tries to show the reader how the world is.” Like Svenvold’s “Big Weather” and other fine nonfiction, “Death and the Sun” brings us deep into a world we may never know firsthand.