Cynthia Barnett's "Rain "begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science--the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains--with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes...

A lengthy California drought escalates to catastrophic proportions, turning Alyssa's quiet suburban street into a warzone, and she is forced to make impossible choices if she and her brother are to survive. The drought--or the Tap-Out, as everyone calls it--has been going on for a while now. Everyone's lives have become an endless list of don'ts: don't water the lawn, don't fill up your pool, don't take long showers. Until the taps run dry. Suddenly,...

"In the Pennywort [farm], there is a garden of edible flowers, a garden meant for touching, and one in which the flowers only bloom at night ... Since her mother's death 5 years ago, Olivia has been carrying on her legacy, caring for Pennywort Gardens and running an informal program that provides safe haven to women in exchange for their help with the lush gardens. The townspeople hate having what they call a 'halfway house' around, and Olivia's neighbors...

"In the vein of The Dry and Before the Fall, a town's dark secrets come to light in the aftermath of a young priest's unthinkable last act in this arresting and searing debut thriller. In Riversend, an isolated rural community afflicted by an endless drought, a young priest does the unthinkable, killing five parishioners before being taken down himself. A year later, accompanied by his own demons from war-time reporting, journalist Martin Scarsden...

As they prepare to make the traditional, pillowy bread called sopaipilla, Christina's grandmother tells about the time her great-grandfather, aided by a scarecrow, brought an end to a drought and, in the process, helped make the first sopaipilla.

"Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, in the corners of her children's dry, cracked lips. It's 1934 and the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma is struggling as the earliest storms of The Dust Bowl descend. All around them the wheat harvests are drying out and people are packing up their belongings as storms lay waste to the Great Plains. As the Bells wait for the rains to come,...

Draws on reports, newspaper articles, and interviews to chronicle the American Dust Bowl, providing photographs to illustrate the catastrophe as well as offer a tribute to man's relationship to the land and his ability to persevere.