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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gripping account of New England's worst storm, July 16, 2005
This review is from: The Great Hurricane: 1938 (Hardcover)
As author Cherie Burns notes more than once in her wonderful new book, "The Great Hurricane: 1938", it's hard to believe that with all the advances in meteorology over the past half-century that there could still today have been a time in people's memories where they were taken by surprise by such a large and deadly hurricane. Yet, that's exactly what happened on September 21, 1938 when New England (and Long Island) bore the brunt of this storm.
What struck me immediately was the fact that people didn't refer to such storms in New England as "hurricanes"...those were storms that hit Florida and the Caribbean. New Englanders were used to "nor'easters" and this one was referred to as the "big blow". The results, after only four hours of onslaught were, of course, devastating. Moving at an incredible sixty miles per hour, "GH38" (as the author calls it) made landfall on the eastern shore of Long Island, creating havoc there before it slammed into Connecticut. Rhode Island suffered the most damage, death and injury as GH38 wiped out most of the shoreline, including an entire small community, Napatree Point, before surging waters overwhelmed the city of Providence. More than seven hundred people died overall and the cost in terms of casualties and property loss would be counted for weeks.
Ms. Burns has an eye for detail and a dramatic narrative style that lends itself well to a book about a natural disaster. She relates that the United States was recently emerging from the shadows of the Depression and gives us reminders not just of life in general, but of people's every day activities. It's her careful approach to this aspect which helps put down a foundation for her story. The bonding elements, though, are those people who actually lived through that awful day...the reader gets to know them as if they were our own next-door neighbors. Her compilation of the collective memories of those she writes about are stirring. Some managed to keep a sense of humor as their worlds were falling apart around them while others simply suffered terrible consequences from the wrath of the storm. The most famous survivor of GH38 was Connecticut's Katharine Hepburn, whose house in Fenwick floated one third of a mile downstream. But this book really belongs to another Catherine...Catherine Moore, whose Rhode Island house broke apart after her family and others had taken refuge in the attic. Just after the wind blew the roof off, they managed to make the attic floor a raft and away they sailed, ending up on Barn Island in Connecticut. Catherine's split-second decisions combined with a fair amount of luck, undoubtedly saved her family.
As she nears the end of the book, Cherie Burns sums up the catastrophe in largely human terms. I laughed out loud when I read about the irony of a lumber mill operator in Brookline, Massachusetts. The farm lost two hundred trees and the author writes, "the owner set up a sawmill to salvage building lumber, and the rest was stacked in woodpiles to burn in stoves and fireplaces. The supply would last until 1980, when her grandson burned the last bundle". This warm, humorous anecdote helps to offset the tragedy of the great hurricane of 1938. Cherie Burns has put together a terrific book about a terrible day, and as I read it in one sitting, I highly recommend it.
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Poorly researched and badly in need of an editor., June 28, 2006
What a disappointment! I'd looked forward to reading this book and now I'm sorry I wasted my money. It covers the same ground as Scotti's "Sudden Sea" but does so with far less ability.
It's repetitious and as another reviewer mentioned, reads like an eighth-grade report on a hurricane. Early on in my reading, I was blaming the editor. The repeated references to there being no satellite or radar tracking of storms in 1938 (does the author really think we need frequent reminders of this?) and rich folks playing down their wealth, the overusage of words like "portentous" and "anyhow" and the unfortunate metaphor of hurricane as "cat" could have been cleaned up (along with some typos) by a good editor. The author thanks her editor in the acknowlegments, so the mind boggles at what the manuscript must have looked like before the final edit.
But what pushed me over the edge were the frequent factual errors, the blame for which lies solely with the author, not the editor. Here are a few:
The author claims that in 1938, the start of the school year fell around October 1. That gave me pause, but I was willing to go with it until I found multiple references in the remainder of the book to children on their way to or from school on the day of the storm.
The author describes the newroom of the Providence Evening Bulletin (which she later refers to, incorrectly, as the "Providence Bulletin") during the storm and in the next sentence says "things weren't going any better for workers at the Providence Journal." Well, duh. The Providence Evening Bulletin and the Providence Journal were the evening and morning editions of the same paper, published on the same presses, from the same newsroom at the same address and by the same reporters.
The author describes someone as being able to look up the bay and see "the lights on the bridge from Barrington to Bristol." There is no such bridge. There is a very small bridge from Barrington to Warren, whose lights were not likely to be visible outside the harbor, and a much larger bridge, the Mt. Hope Bridge, visible up and down the bay, which connects Bristol to Aquidneck Island.
The author references the situation at City Hall in Providence and in the next sentence says "next door at the Hope Club". The Hope Club is not next door to City Hall, nor is it anywhere downtown. The Hope Club is on College Hill, on Benefit Street.
The author describes action taking place at the intersection of Orange St. and Fawcett St. in downtown Providence. There is no Fawcett St. in Providence. Did she mean Friendship Street? Who knows?
In recounting tree damage, the author says, "In Providence, Goddard Park..." Goddard Park is not in Providence, it's in North Kingstown, approximately 20 miles away.
There are more, but after factual error piled upon factual error, I lost the will to go on reading. All of these errors could have been easily fixed with the most cursory of fact-checking. But clearly, the author couldn't be bothered.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An unheralded disaster, June 24, 2008
What lessons do we learn from ferocious weather? This planet is our home and our playground and it's easy to forget that we're at the mercy of the elements -- until Mother Nature throws us a hard ball like the Great Hurricane of 1938. Thundering into Long Island, Connecticut and Rhode Island, this great storm devastated homes, farms and commercial areas. Hundreds of thousands of trees were blown down, transportation and essential services were disrupted, and seven hundred people lost their lives.
Author Cherie Adams sets the scene: 1938 is poised between the Great Depression and the start of World War II. The front-page stories are focusing on the annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland region by the Third Reich. Weather prediction is slow and unreliable, so nobody worries that the inside pages of the newspaper are predicting high winds and heavy rain.
The eastern coastal regions are enjoying the last weeks of nice weather along the shore. In comes the hurricane, with an exceptional forward speed of 60 miles per hour. Whatever difference warning might have made, there is no warning and the winds, rain and solstice-swelled storm surge wreck everything in their path.
Adams' weather scenes are vivid and her statistics at the end are quite awesome. Her sources are letters, newspaper stories and other written reports, as well as whatever eyewitness accounts are available so long after the event. She presents the human side of the disaster in strobe-like jumps from one "character" to another, never developing any of them fully so that they blur into a confusion. Some stand out--the wedding party, the schoolboy in a new suit, the cameo appearance of actress Katharine Hepburn--but most are like too many snapshots of strangers in someone's old album.
I'm not sure what I wanted from this book. A better understanding of life in 1938? Meteorological context? Most of all, probably, insight into the strength of character that helps individuals survive a cataclysmic loss. I came away feeling that I would have done better to re-read Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm," or even--reaching back to 1977--"Condominium" by John D. McDonald. Or the best idea of all, one might find the original stories, articles, memoirs, and read them in the writers' own words.
I listened to an unabridged audio presentation of this book so did not have the benefit of any maps or photos, of which I understand from other reviewers there were too few. The book shows intensive research and the writing is effective, though the organization is not what I would have preferred. Three stars.
Linda Bulger, 2008
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