I want to say something funny here. I want to poke fun at Brantley’s affinity for “cat facts,” or his life in “the bubble,” or his fear of ghosts, or his inexplicable desire to climb–and then jump off of–things he shouldn’t. But no. Today we celebrate.
It’s official: Simon & Schuster will publish D contributor Brantley Hargrove’s forthcoming book about famed storm chaser Tim Samaras and the gigantic tornado–the widest ever recorded–that killed him. The book, tentatively titled The Storm is likely to come out some time in early 2016. It grew out of the reporting Brantley did for this Dallas Observer story last year. I know David Patterson, his agent, is very excited. So is Brantley, though he knows he has a formidable task in front of him.
“Tim Samaras was a remarkable man,” Brantley told me this afternoon. “I hope I do justice by his story, and those of his comrades.”
I’ve written before about how Brantley and I (and Paul Knight at Texas Monthly) all met in journalism school. Eight years ago, we were sitting around in George Getschow’s classes, dreaming and talking about how cool it might be if one day we worked for magazines and had book deals like so many of the great writers we admired. Paul’s first book, Devil on the Plains, will be published by Penguin next year.
Read Brantley’s latest feature for D Magazine, about some slightly less natural natural disasters, here. And if you see him, congratulate him. Or pretend to be a ghost and watch him jump off the second story of a building.
