Customer Reviews

Curse of The Narrows: The Halifax Disaster of 1917

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Ms. MacDonald has researched the definitive account of the destruction of the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia during World War I. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong : from the right two ships colliding (one of them carrying nearly 3,000 tons of munitions) to the bomb ship drifting to Halifax before exploding and the blizzard that struck the City afterwards.

The disorganized search and rescue attempts through the snowstorm of the City in rubble (think of the destruction caused by hurricanes or by an atomic bomb) takes up the last half of the book. Nearly 2,000 people were killed by the blast with disabling injuries for the thousands of survivors. Ms. MacDonald writes of her native City with more detail than was perhaps necessary but the story is a page-turner and serves as a warning to the reader that life has not changed much in terms of disaster relief over the past century.

This is an exemplary and very interesting bit of historical writing. Oddly enough, I have a couple of other books on massive industrial explosions, including the Texas City disaster in 1947 and the explosion of the Ft. Stikine in Bombay harbor in 1944. MacDonald's book is by far the best. It's well organized, gracefully written, and mediates between the perspectives of the present and the lessons of the past in a particularly sensitive way. Most importantly, I think, it treats those caught up in the disaster with the utmost respect, avoiding the easiest trap for writers of historical non-fiction: the unconscious assumption that people in the past, because they wore funny clothes and had attitudes strange to us, were somehow quaint and not as bright as we are. MacDonald tells this story with great compassion and insight without milking it for melodrama (which would have been very easy).

Because she allows the past to speak for itself whenever possible, there are some really thought-provoking bits to those interested in modern disaster planning. I found it particularly interesting that the Red Cross of that day, for example, strongly preferred to work with citizen committees rather than political leaders, regarding the latter as being nearly useless because of the way they start to pursue their own agendas the instant in the initial shock wears off.

As a military history buff, I've known about the explosion of the Mont Blanc for a long time. I'm really glad to have such a wonderful book on it.

My great grandparents were young people around the time of the First World War, and with the boys called away to service overseas, my great grandmother and plenty of other "land girls" were called to man the plows of the little farms in upstate New York, where a struggling rutabaga truck farm kept all the neighboring women pon the job morning, noon and night, with time only off for Sunday school and church worship at the nearest community center, some twelve miles out. My great grandmother heard the noise of the Imo explosion and never forgot it, for the mule she was behind got skeered and ran into the next man's acreage, a feat he never did again, that lazy gray mule they called Buster. The harvest was long gone, for this was the beginning of winter right after American Thanksgiving, but my great-grandmother was once again tearing up the ruts, a weekly chore even in a nor'easter or snowstorm.

"The sky was full of black dust," she swore to me, as a very old woman in the early 1970s. "Looked like a billion locusts. And then we sniffed the air and we knew, them was part of people!" Laura Mac Donald, a topnotch TV producer, has interviewed many survivors of that long ago tragedy in Halifax, many of whom suffered permanent hearing loss as a result of the fiery explosion, the shock waves of which were heard not only in the Finger Lakes but, it is said, even in the Caribbean paradises of Cuba and Santo Domingo. In truth, it was a tsunami, and the producers of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW should hold on to their footage for when the day comes and the studios want to bring this Canadian tragedy to life.

As usual, the poor people paid the most, the people of the North End who couldn't get out in time. There were so many people killed and dying that they ran out of gravediggers. Why, they even ran out of preachers, and when did that ever occur before or since? My great grandmother said the Catholics got it worst, and Mac Donald's figures show that in one parish alone, St. Joseph's, nearly five hundred members lost their lives in a single instant. "Some clergymen simply remained in or near the cemetery during the day," writes Mac Donald, "performing funerals until it got too dark to read."

And all of this in the days and weeks that should have been happy ones, the weeks before Christmas!

An inquest was held and Mac Donald somehow got hold of the complete transcript, which illuminates who was to blame and who was completely innocent. You have to know a lot about intercoastal shipping to understand this material, it's dense, like the very thickest parts of the Warren Report. Otherwise the book grips you like three magnets.

My Grandparents, my mother and her two brothers lived through the Halifax Explosion. They were among the few families that survived intact. Ms Mac Donald's book "put flesh" on the stories which we heard as young people. My Grandmother went to her death still with glass in her throatfrom that occasion. Reading the story in this narrative form made it come alive in an interesting way.

This bit of history, was unknown to me, untuil I read the book. The author succeeds in transporting you back in time. I felt like I was living within the time frame of the tragic events of this explosion.
Very powerfully written. I would highly recommend this book

I had heard of this event before - the largest non-nuclear explosion in history - and had been dying to read all the details. It's a fascinating story ... A ship carrying high explosives wrecks in Halifax harbor during WWI, right before Christmas. The resulting explosion is incredible - basically, flattening the town and killing thousands. Interestingly, it's something that most people haven't heard about - or, if they have, have only the vaguest notions. What a possibility for a fascinating book.

Unfortunately, I found *this* book very uneven. It's certainly comprehensive - 300+ pages, with lots of research. And, at times, it's a real page turner (the author is a TV and film writer). I also liked the focus on the relief effort, as I knew nothing about that beforehand.

On the other hand, I don't think this is the author's metier. There is just too much detail. It was really hard to follow who was who (there are so many characters!) and what was actually going on (especially relative to the wreck and the trial).

I didn't get the feeling that the author really put the effort she should have into sifting all the information, weighing whether something should be included, and doing some real editing. I would also have liked to have more explanation and discussion. It seemed like one first-person story after another.

As far as I can tell, this is the only book about this event. Given that, I can definitely recommend this book. If you have just a casual interest, though, I'm not so sure.

Totally engrossing. A heck of a tale, and all true. And the medical detail is wonderful. Chloroform!
I am lucky that a Canadian friend gave me this book for Christmas.

When I started reading this book, I had a bit of difficulty with some of the nautical terms and some of the marine lingo. My lack of familiarity with the geography of Halifax and its surroundings slowed me down a bit as well. However, in a very short time, things started to pick up steam, so to speak. This book is a real page-turner. The fact that many people's individual stories are fragmented through the book and interwoven with other people's stories seems to contribute to the fact that the book is very difficult to put down. The writing is clear and, as can be gleaned from above, quite engaging. This book is a valuable addition to North American, especially Canadian, history. It illustrates how humans can be so tireless, selfless and generous towards each other in the wake of horrible disasters.

On December 5, 1917, a munitions-laden ship, the Mont Blanc, arrives at Halifax harbor from New York. Slow-moving and arriving too late one day to make the passage, the ship anchors outside the submarine gates for the night and then proceeds towards the inner harbor the next morning, December 6. Another ship, the Imo, is heading out through the Narrows. An almost inexplicable, confusing, miscommunication causes the exiting, confused Imo to slice into the Mont Blanc. Fire and explosions immediately ensue. The ship is a floating bomb of epic proportions, filled with the most powerful and sensitive explosives on the planet. Ironically, the crew of the Mont Blanc is perhaps the only group to survive relatively intact and unscathed that day, as the men scramble for the eastern shore - the Dartmouth side -- of the Narrows. But Halifax will not be so fortunate. Within twenty-five minutes, the crippled, burning Mont Blanc reaches Pier 6, and there is an explosion of a force stronger than Katrina that shatters the quiet harbor, followed by a tsunami. Within minutes, 2,000 people are dead and more than 5,000 injured in gruesome fashion. It is like a non-atomic Hiroshima bomb struck a two-mile radius of the harbor. So big, Robert Oppenheimer later studied the blasts effects to better understand his own bomb thirty-five years later. Many locals think it is an attack by Germans, perhaps by that new-fangled weapon, the airplane. The morning's man-made disaster is followed by a crippling blizzard that night, but the aftermath is a human success story. The relief from Boston is heroic. The triage process even teaches new medical techniques, especially in pediatric surgery. In the aftermath, charges are leveled against both ships and their pilots, but nothing much comes of it. It is so much "he whistled, she whistled," French versus English, and the law of the land versus the law of the sea. If something similar happened today, the financial liabilities, lawsuits, and awards would have been awesome. Yet the convictions are overturned. A little money changes hands. The survivors get some relief. People return to work and to the harbor.

So much detail, it is times confusing. Nautical terms and French language can be as confusing to the reader as the exchange of whistles was to the two doomed ships. Referring to the maps is helpful but frustrating: They are small, placed at the front of the book, and absent some of the details that correlate with the events and movements of people in the text. This was a large disaster; at times I felt as lost as some of the survivors must have felt. There are so many stories, so many people, and such an encyclopedia of horrors that the reader's mind can numb. But the story is memorable even if the details are sometimes difficult to follow.

Once again, I have learned something that I had never known before reading this book: the explosion, tsunami and massive snowstorm that struck Halifax, Nova Scotia in December 1917. This is a well-written book that outlines the ship accident minute by minute, and then comprehensively details its awful aftermath. We get a story of great suffering and heroic action, particularly by the medical staffs that came to help from Boston, New York, and a host of Canadian cities. These dedicated people worked day and night without stopping to alleviate the suffering of the population of Halifax. If you wish to read a tale of heroism in the face of tremendous odds, this is the book for you.