Disaster!

I am obsessed with books about disasters. This began in college when I first read Holocaust! The shocking story of the Boston Cocoanut Grove fire. It's out of print now, but one can get it at the library. Here's a nice summary of the fire.

Here is where I give my very good friend Robin the credit for my love of disaster narratives. She introed me to the Cocoanut Grove book in 1993 or thereabouts. She just recently loaned me her copy of Holocaust so I could re-read it. It was great the second time too. There are fire codes and laws that were changed nation-wide because of that fire.

Then there's Dark Tide, which I became obsessed with when it came out in paperback in 2004. I read it in only a couple of days. I had heard my whole life about the great molasses flood in Boston, believing the rumors when I was small that on hot days, you could still smell molasses on the streets in the North End. The book read like a novel and again, building and engineering codes and laws changed nation-wide because of this disaster.

I met the author of Dark Tide, Stephen Puleo at a book signing and then convinced my workplace to use it as the text for an ethics class. I have passed it on to more people than perhaps any other book I've ever read.

When I was travelling in Belize last September, I read Anita Shreve's A Wedding in December, which has a story-within-a-story set during the Halifax Explosion. I was fascinated, but didn't really take the time to look up info about that disaster. Then, I visited Robin a couple weeks ago, and told her I was headed to Nova Scotia for vacation this fall. She had been recently, and of course, has a Halifax Explosion book. This one is called Too Many to Mourn, and uses one family to tell the story of the explosion. There were 66 members of the Jackson family living in the Richmond area of Halifax at the time of the explosion, and 46 of them were killed. The son of one of the surviving women wrote the book. It was excellent. This disaster is the reason that Halifax has such a great relationship with Boston and Massachusetts since we sent so many doctors, nurses and supplies to their rescue. That giant Christmas tree we get every year for the Pru comes from the people of Halifax to the people of Boston. Pretty cool tradition, considering we're coming up on almost 100 years.

All of these disasters took place in the first half of the 20th century. The impact they had on history is clear. The books were written in a narrative form that takes the reader back to meet those who were there during the disaster, which I love.

I also read Boston on Fire not too long ago, which is a compilation of most of the major Boston fires, each getting a shorter writing. Boston has had more major fires than any other U.S. city (probably because we've been around longer). Stephanie Schorow does a nice job with this book too.

Of course, I've read the requisite Into Thin Air, Alive, and Into the Wild. But those aren't really disasters. They are human endeavors gone wrong. Well, okay, Alive was just a plane crash, but it's more of a survival story.

I have to be really careful after I read one of these books to not go on and on about the details of the event to friends, family and strangers, even. I'm a massive dork, and I have to try to remember to keep it in check. Mostly, I fail, thinking, "Who wouldn't want to know about this? It's amazing!" The answer is: most people. Most people just don't care about this kind of stuff.

I'm sad for them, actually.

UPDATE: How could I forget Endurance, the story of Shackleford and Antartica? A bunch of explorer dudes all got stuck in the ice floes on a ship. The ship ends up torn to pieces and they have to walk out of there. Amazing book. And Ship of Gold? How could I forget that? I passed that book out to all my diver friends in Thailand. One copy ended up more ratty and dogeared than any book I've ever owned. A ship full of gold was sailing from San Fran around the bottom of South America (pre-Panama Canal) to NYC and sank off the coast of North Carolina in the 1850s during the gold rush. They found her in the 1980s. More here. Anyway, thanks again to Robin who remembered that I passed these both to her.