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Hurricane Katrina overwhelms the levies of New Orleans and floods the city, driving thousands from their homes. A massive tornado tears through Joplin, Missouri, turning houses into matchsticks and killing over a hundred fifty people. A record earthquake in Japan triggers a tsunami tidal wave that obliterates towns and leaves thousands dead and homeless. These are among the recent incidents where forces of Nature continue to make life a perilous undertaking.

There are other forces loose in the world which compound life’s precarious state. These are the forces created by people acting instinctively, driven by the biological elements that generate their personalities or the outside circumstances that dictate their actions. Such actions exhibit the same level of “free will” and “choice” as floods, fires, hurricanes or earthquakes. It is those actions which are the topics in “Forces of Nature”: six stories of the actions of people which are more properly viewed as natural phenomena at work.

The first story “The Bet” focuses on “highest and best use”, a concept in real estate development which selects the use of real property producing the greatest monetary value. This force unleashes development which has the power to change the landscape as dramatically as any hurricane, tornado or earthquake, in this case a town’s veterans’ cemetery which is an ideal location for luxury condominiums. Another powerful force that takes on a life of its own and drives people to acts which would otherwise be unthinkable is patriotism. This is presented in “Dodging the Crocodiles”, a story loosely based on the 1918 Robert Prager incident in which a mob of 200 locals in Collinsville, Illinois lynched a German immigrant allegedly (but wrongly) for pro-German sympathies during World War I. . The third story “The Miracle of Bethlehem” looks at an institution which begins with a specific purpose (a way for pilgrims to observe the “Miracle Family” – Mary, Joe and the baby Jes born on Christmas morning in an abandoned barn in a canyon near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) but in time expands into a high-end shopping center that pursues its own purposes, with a superficial nod to the reason for which it was founded.

The fourth story “The Lewis House” traces how the creative ideas incorporated by an innovative architect into the design of a private residence are distorted by later owners whose ignorance or indifference towards the original design plus the sense of entitlement that comes with ownership become an irrational force that turns a work of architectural art into an unrecognizable ruin, not dissimilar to buying Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” and feeling entitled to add a mustache and goatee or burdening the important principles of a constitution with small-minded, self-serving amendments. War is the subject of the fifth story “Another One Goes Bad”, in which a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient in the Korean War loses his leg to protect a tungsten mine from North Korean attack but is denied a kidney by