Hurricane Gordon didn't deliver any sucker punches last week, but it sure made those of us who once again prepared for the worst feel like suckers. But the worst might be yet to come, says the author of a new book on hurricanes. He claims Mother Nature is back on the warpath.

By ELIZABETH BENNETT

When the disastrous Labor Day hurricane of 1935 hit the Florida Keys, Ernest Hemingway was living and writing in Key West. Hemingway joined the rescue effort after the Category 5 storm -- with little warning -- wreaked havoc in the area.

"Max, you can't imagine it," Hemingway wrote his editor Maxwell Perkins. ". . . two women, naked, tossed up into the trees by the water, swollen and stinking, their breasts as big as balloons. . . . We located sixty-nine bodies where no one had been able to get in. Indian Key absolutely swept clean, not a blade of grass . . ."

Nine years earlier, Miami had been nearly destroyed by the hurricane of 1929. Numerous other devastating storms made landfall in Florida and the rest of the United States between 1926 and 1969, followed by a relatively quiet period, from 1970 to 1994, with about half as many hurricanes.

Now, once again, they are on the increase, ripping through the United States as surely and inexorably as the sun rises in the morning," warns Pete Davies in Inside the Hurricane. The long-range forecast for this season, which extends through November, calls for seven, with three growing to Category 3 or worse.

"What should concern us now is that after a quarter century of relative peace it's beginning to look very much as if nature threw the switch again," writes Davies, a British journalist and novelist.

To understand the inner working of these deadly storms, Davies flew into the eye of both Hurricanes Bret and Floyd in 1999 with daredevil pilots from the national Hurricane Research Division in Miami. He helped scientists on the flight conduct experiments aimed at learning how a storm strengthens over the ocean and how the wind behaves, and he experienced firsthand what these bold storm-hunters routinely do to learn more about taming hurricanes.

His participation in such cutting-edge research makes this book special. He writes vividly about the sea boiling and heaving below, creating cliffs of water 60 feet high, and about the constant turbulence that begins to seep in "through every inch of your body." His dramatic descriptions capture the excitement of these hazardous missions and present a persuasive argument for increased funding for what he calls "good science done by brave men on a puny budget."

But Davies also tells the human side of these natural disasters.

He interviewed numerous survivors of recent hurricanes, including killer storm Mitch, which devastated the entire country of Honduras in 1998. He tells tragic stories of whole families buried alive in their homes by landslides -- entire sections of mountainside crumbling under pounding rain that continued 24 hours a day for two weeks. He writes about thousands of people, wretchedly poor to begin with, living in shacks of wood and tin, and having "no possible defense."

Power, light and sewage systems collapsed throughout Honduras, as Davies reminds us, and the best part of 1-million people -- one in six of the population -- were displaced from their homes. Unknown thousands were dead or missing. His chart in the back of the book, listing the 15 most deadly Atlantic hurricanes, puts Mitch in fourth place. In all of Central America, Mitch killed an estimated 9,000 people.

(The 1900 storm in Galveston, with an estimated 9,000 deaths, is listed as only the second worst storm on the chart. "The Great Hurricane" in Martinique/Barbados in 1780, with 22,000 deaths, is No. 1.)

Inside the Hurricane is full of facts and figures about these deadly storms, which usually occur in August, September or October, though the actual hurricane season continues through November. They're called cyclones in India and Australia, typhoons in the Western Pacific, and "baguios" in the South China Sea. Some 85-90 occur somewhere in the world every year, often in remote places not much noticed by the Western media.

On average, the United States has nine or 10 named storms a year, with six becoming hurricanes and two of those six turning into major hurricanes. Most begin in West Africa as a disturbance called a tropical wave, growing in force and destructiveness as they cross the Atlantic; the parts of the country most at risk are the Gulf states and the Eastern Seaboard.

In a busy hurricane period such as the one we are entering now, Miami can expect a severe impact every 10 years, Davies warns. South Florida is especially vulnerable, he notes, with an estimated 600 people moving to the state every day, often to the suburbs or to retirement communities newly developed along the coastline where hurricanes are most threatening.

Inside the Hurricane answers a lot of questions people living in a storm-prone area need to know, and it's filled with enough drama to keep you reading to the end.

Elizabeth Bennett, former book editor of the Houston Post, is a freelance writer in Houston.

Inside the Hurricane: Face to Face with Nature's Deadliest Storms

By Pete Davies

Henry Holt, $25

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