David Laskin (born October 25, 1953) is an American writer of books about history, travel, weather, gardens and literary biography.
Laskin married law professor Kate O’Neill in 1982; in 1993 they moved from New York to Seattle, Washington, with their three daughters, Emily, Sarah and Alice.
[1] Though Laskin has written on a range of subjects, his recent books have focused on ordinary people swept up in the cataclysms of history.
These men – four Italian-Americans, three Jews, two Poles, an Irishman, a Slovak and a Norwegian – fought bravely in the trenches of France and Belgium; three of them were killed in action; two received the Medal of Honor.
The Children’s Blizzard, published by HarperCollins in 2004, tells the story of The Schoolhouse Blizzard, a sudden winter storm that bore down on the Upper Midwest on January 12, 1888 and killed hundreds of settlers, many of them children on their way home from one-room prairie schoolhouses.