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Frankly, I am struggling to find anything positive to say about this book. (Sorry Charlie!)
It came across to me as cut-and-paste tabloid journalism at its worst, shamelessly cobbling together other people's research, along with a lot about his personal hero Joseph Barss, in order to cash in on the centenary of this dreadful disaster.
Indeed, so enraged was I by it that I then did some hunting around and came up with a book called Shattered City by Janet Kitz, which I have almost finished reading. She it was who did a vast amount of research back in the 1980s, interviewing survivors, working on trying to match the bags of belongings never claimed to people listed among the dead, and working on the display in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax. This was opened on 6 December 1987, seventy years after the blast.
Bacon's book does show how heavily he used Kitz's book plus another by her about the children who survived the explosion, so at least he does acknowledge that.
About the best thing I can say is that I thought that Chapter 8 contained a good summary of the various failings which together led to the disaster. (That information is all in Kitz's book of course, in her detailed chapter on the Inquiry. Bacon skips over the Inquiry in about five and a half pages.)
I only wish I had read Kitz before I read Bacon.
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