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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
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.
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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.)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
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.
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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.
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I'm going to have to go with the ladies on this one. I thought I had issues with
Radium Girls, but this one took the cake a bit more.
I found the organization of the book troubling, as well as the tendency of the author to put thoughts and feelings into historical character's minds. This was a major complaint from me with Radium Girls as well. I was puzzled by the opening of the book, tying the good people of Boston and anti-American sentiment all up into one narrative theme.
But my biggest beef, like Issy, was Barss. I have more respect for soldiers of WWI than perhaps any other armed conflict. But what his history in the war had to do with this disaster beyond his ability to react to it was beyond me. And why was he so special to be singled out? Why was his personal narrative half of this story? The more cynical part of me wonders if it isn't his background as a seminal founder of collegiate hockey and his coaching career therein.
In addition to the thoughts above, I found the coverage of the legal proceedings to be very lacking. I had the same gripe with the
Radium Girls.
I was largely disappointed with this one. But, it did help me to think and discuss with some others what I am actually looking for when I read history. I know Charlie drew a comparison to John Hersey's work
Hiroshima, which I read back in college. I think Hersey pulled off the "story through the eyes of individuals" much better, and it shows me that I don't mind the form. What I do mind is when it isn't coming from interviews or first-hand accounts. It doesn't take much of the air of a fictional internal monologue to kill a work of nonfiction for me, it seems. So I am at least grateful to the books for that in making me think through the issue.