MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - New Leaf August 2018 Discussion • The Great Halifax Explosion by John U. Bacon

issybird · 08-16-2018, 08:01 AM

I'm not going to pull my punches, here; I thought this book was extremely bad. I found it shoddy history, offensive and poorly written, and that was before I read the Kitz account, which Bacon appropriates in huge swathes and without what seems to me proper annotation or citation. I would have abandoned it early on when I came across one fabrication too many, except that it was a book club read.

I won't go into all my objections now and Bookpossum has addressed the Kitz issue; I'll start with the offensiveness, on two particular fronts. If I were Canadian, I'd be infuriated by this treatment. Somehow, Bacon makes the focus of a Canadian national disaster the response of Massachusetts in sending aid, which is outrageous in itself and also leads Bacon to huge historical inaccuracies (or as I said on GR, "He's just making this up.") The Christmas tree in Boston should not have been the hook for a history of a Canadian event. Bacon in fact has the attitude he ascribes (falsely) to the United States government; it's all about the US. Just those first few paragraphs would have had me looking for a different book if I came to this as a Canadian.

Second, Barss. Whatever has Barss to do with anything? Pages and pages of his boyhood, young manhood, and experience in the trenches (compare that to the cursory treatment of the inquiry) which were entirely irrelevant to the event. And then it turns out Barss, like that Christmas tree* one of the two fulcra of the entire account of a major disaster, is there because his three days helping out afterwards served as the epiphany for his changing his life. I'm sure those thousands of victims would have been glad that the sacrifice of their lives or health was not in vain. That was just heavy-handed and insensitive and what compounds it is that it's obviously because Barss figured heavily in Bacon's first book and he had all that perfectly good research still sitting around. More stuff to copy and paste.

*Let's also not overlook the fact that the Christmas tree, a lovely gesture in 1918, was not made an annual gift for more than half a century. Another name for that is "tourism."

And that's just for starters.

08-16-2018, 08:01 AM	#13
issybird o saeclum infacetum Posts: 21,627 Karma: 237001505 Join Date: Oct 2010 Location: New England Device: Mini, H2O, Glo HD, Aura One, PW4, PW5	I'm not going to pull my punches, here; I thought this book was extremely bad. I found it shoddy history, offensive and poorly written, and that was before I read the Kitz account, which Bacon appropriates in huge swathes and without what seems to me proper annotation or citation. I would have abandoned it early on when I came across one fabrication too many, except that it was a book club read. I won't go into all my objections now and Bookpossum has addressed the Kitz issue; I'll start with the offensiveness, on two particular fronts. If I were Canadian, I'd be infuriated by this treatment. Somehow, Bacon makes the focus of a Canadian national disaster the response of Massachusetts in sending aid, which is outrageous in itself and also leads Bacon to huge historical inaccuracies (or as I said on GR, "He's just making this up.") The Christmas tree in Boston should not have been the hook for a history of a Canadian event. Bacon in fact has the attitude he ascribes (falsely) to the United States government; it's all about the US. Just those first few paragraphs would have had me looking for a different book if I came to this as a Canadian. Second, Barss. Whatever has Barss to do with anything? Pages and pages of his boyhood, young manhood, and experience in the trenches (compare that to the cursory treatment of the inquiry) which were entirely irrelevant to the event. And then it turns out Barss, like that Christmas tree* one of the two fulcra of the entire account of a major disaster, is there because his three days helping out afterwards served as the epiphany for his changing his life. I'm sure those thousands of victims would have been glad that the sacrifice of their lives or health was not in vain. That was just heavy-handed and insensitive and what compounds it is that it's obviously because Barss figured heavily in Bacon's first book and he had all that perfectly good research still sitting around. More stuff to copy and paste. *Let's also not overlook the fact that the Christmas tree, a lovely gesture in 1918, was not made an annual gift for more than half a century. Another name for that is "tourism." And that's just for starters.