Peter S. Felknor. The Tri-State Tornado: The Story of America's Greatest Tornado Disaster. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1992. Pp. 131 with appendices, notes and bibliography. $13.95 (paper).

David Kenney. Making a Modern Constitution: The Illinois Experience. Murphysboro, III: Jackson County Historical Society, 1991. Pp. 176 with illustrations, notes and index. $24 for non-members, $21 for members (paper).

James R. Giles and J. Michael Lennon, eds. The James Jones Reader. New York Birch Lane Press, 1991. Pp. 404 with introduction, appendix and bibliographies. $24.95 (cloth).

Illustration fromn The Tri-State Tornado reprinted with permission from Iowa State University Press, copyright 1992

If anything unites the books reviewed here beside their various connections to Illinois, it is how each raises the question of what fades and what endures — in historical incidents, political documents or literary works.

Our fascination with large-scale disasters, both natural and man-made, assures them instant public attention, but accidents of timing and location often influence their ultimate place in history. Ironically, more Illinoisans have probably heard of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake than of the 1925 tri-state tornado which devastated five counties in southern Illinois, killing more people and cutting a broader path of destruction.

Now Peter Felknor, a meteorology student at the University of Wisconsin, has recovered from relative oblivion the story of America's greatest tornado disaster. By interviewing survivors of the storm, studying contemporary accounts of its impact and examining subsequent research on twisters, Felknor recreates this cataclysmic event with "you are there" immediacy.

The reader travels with the tornado from its touchdown at 1 p.m. on March 18, 1925, in the Missouri Ozarks to its dissipation at 4 p.m. in southwestern Indiana. In those three hours it killed 689 people (606 in Illinois), injured 1,980 (1,563 in Illinois) and did $16.5 million in property damage ($13 million in Illinois). Lacking both the funnel cloud and skipping motion typical of such storms, the tri-state tornado was 6 to 12 times as wide (up to one mile at its base) and moved twice as fast (between 60 and 75 mph) as the average tornado. It also traveled farther (219 miles) than any other documented tornado. The twister struck along a northeastern path virtually without warning since at the time the national weather bureau did not forecast severe storms of this type or issue weather bulletins when they developed.

Felknor's extensive research and the fascinating book it has spawned give readers not only a vivid picture of this singular disaster but also a useful overview of tornadoes in general. Since 1925 science has improved our knowledge of such storms as well as our early warning capability when they are likely to break out, but unfortunately science has brought us no closer to containing their awesome energy or eliminating their tragic toll. Less dramatic yet more far-reaching than a force of nature, the winds of constitutional change also sweep Illinois periodically, allowing voters to decide whether the current state charter should be maintained or replaced. In Making a Modem Constitution, David Kenney — a down-state delegate to Illinois' Sixth Constitutional Convention in 1969-70 — provides an eye-witness account of the process which created the states's present charter. He also assesses its effectiveness over the past two decades. To this task he brings impressive credentials as an academic analyst and a political practitioner. A political science professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Kenney is coauthor of Basic Illinois Government and former director of the Department of Conservation from 1977 to 1984 under Gov. James R. Thompson.

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Kenney offers a chronological description of the constitution-making process from approval of the convention call on November 5, 1968, to ratification of the proposed charter on December 15, 1970. He analyzes the composition of the delegation and profiles some of its notable members, including Richard M. Daley, Michael J. Madigan and Dawn Clark Netsch. In addition, he discusses the major articles as well as the debates and deals which determined their final language.

Not surprisingly, Kenney finds that party affiliation explains more variation in convention voting than any other factor, although delegates were nominated and elected on a nonpartisan basis. Among the 116 delegates were 56 Republicans, 45 Democrats and 15 so-called independents. Because of their ability to provide the critical swing votes on hotly contested issues, the independents — Democrats outside the regular Cook County machine — exercized greater influence than their numbers suggest. Among the potentially divisive matters which occupied the convention were abortion, the 18-year-old vote and the death penalty. Kenney argues, however, that the question of whether judges should be elected (the practice then and now) or appointed emerged as the focal controversy of the convention.

While Kenney concludes that on the whole the 1970 charter has served the state well, he acknowledges that selection of judges remains controversial, especially in light of Operation Greylord's recent revelation of widespread corruption in the Cook County courts. Several other major problems persist. In Kenney's view, the state has not funded public elementary and secondary education at the constitutionally mandated level, the legislature has failed to develop a satisfactory method of redistricting and the General Assembly has not proposed significant amendments, as envisioned by the framers. For these reasons, Kenney believes another convention is in order. Voters will have a chance to consider this prospect in 2008 if not before.

Making a Modem Constitution suffers in some ways from its genesis as an occasional soft-cover publication of the Jackson County Historical Society. Photographic material has reproduced poorly on low-grade paper, and professional proofreading would have caught minor mechanical errors in the text. Such reservations aside, Making a Modem Constitution — like the document it analyzes — holds up well under scrutiny.

Unlike constitutions, which are subject to amendment and even replacement when necessary, literary classics represent timeless creative expression. On the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor which occasioned James Jones's masterpiece From Here to Eternity, James R. Giles and J. Michael Lennon, professors of English at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb and Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., respectively, have edited an indispensable anthology of his work.

The James Jones Reader contains 67 excerpts, ranging from a first-time printing of selections from Jones's unpublished apprentice novel. They Shall Inherit the Laughter (1945), to sections of his Viet Journal, based on Jones's month in Vietnam in 1973 and published in 1974, three years before his death. To peruse this collection is to realize anew how much of Jones's life and art was dominated by the threat, the fact, the aftermath of war. He was truly "the Tolstoy of American foot soldiers," as Kurt Vonnegut has said. This Reader provides a valuable overview of Jones's career, enriched by judicious prefatory notes and enlarged by juxtaposition of familiar and fresh materials.

Judith L Everson is associate professor in the English Program and associate editor of Illinois Issues at Sangamon State University, where she also serves as co-curator of the Handy Writers' Colony Collection containing many James Jones materials.

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