The Grid and the Village: Losing Electricity, Finding Community, Surviving Disaster [Hardcover]

Stephen Doheny-Farina (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300089775 | ISBN-13: 978-0300089776 | Publication Date: September 1, 2001

In January 1998 a massive ice storm descended on New York, New England, and eastern Canada. It crushed power grids from the Great Lakes to the North Atlantic, forcing thousands of people into public shelters and leaving millions of others in their homes without electricity. In this riveting book Stephen Doheny-Farina presents an insider's account of these events, describing the destruction of the electric network in his own village and the emergence of the face-to-face interactions that took its place. His stories examine the impact of electronic communications on community, illuminating the relationship between electronic and human connections and between networks and neighbourhoods, and exploring why and how media portrayals of disasters can distort authentic experience. Doheny-Farina begins by discussing the disaster and tracing the origins of the storm. He then goes back two hundred years to tell how this particular electric grid was built, showing us the sacrifices people made to create the grids that (usually) connect us to one another. Today's power grid, says Doheny-Farina, has become more vulnerable than we realise, as demand begins to outstrip capacity in urban centres around the nation. His book reminds us what those grids mean, both positively and negatively, to our electronically saturated lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Whether he is writing about the power grids that connect and illuminate our homes, the media and telecommunications webs that on any given news day put us all on the same page, or the social connections of family and neighborhood we rely on for support, Doheny-Farina (The Wired Neighborhood) provokes a startling awareness, or as he terms it, a "mindfulness," of what we have and how easily it can all be lost or regained, either through complacency or abrupt disaster. He strikes a deeply personal note in this blending of top-drawer social criticism with a gripping firsthand account of the 1998 ice storm that shut down parts of New York, New England and Canada. On its most basic level, this is Doheny-Farina's account of how that disaster changed him, his family and his neighbors in his hometown of Potsdam, N.Y., of 23 days without the power and communications grids we all take for granted and "the emergence of a community that filled the resulting void." But this book's great achievement rests not only on the author's sympathetic storyteller's eye, but also on his strikingly unique selection and ordering of information. His chapters are a weave of storm narrative, vignettes on the origin and evolution of the modern-day grid around Potsdam, and smart and notably self-aware riffs on the media's dubious role in disaster, this book being one example. The author's technique is as eye-opening as the sudden and complete leveling of a power grid by sheets of ice. (Sept.) Forecast: While smartly written by a professor and published under the Yale imprimatur, this is a trade book, and one that, marketed properly, could find many sympathetic readers this winter. With rolling blackouts a recent, much hyped threat, grid issues have come enough to the fore that this media-savvy book fills a niche.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Doheny-Farina (technical communications, Clarkson Univ.; The Wired Neighborhood) presents a firsthand account of the Northeast's massive ice storm of 1998 and its consequences for his town of Potsdam, NY. This storm downed power grids from the Great Lakes to the North Atlantic, leaving some parts of the Eastern Seaboard without power for almost a month. Three stories are interwoven in this narrative: the history of power grids in the Northeast, the story of the storm, and its consequences for the community. Without access to mass media or network communications, Doheny-Farina and his neighbors discovered how much these technologies have come to shape every aspect of daily life. He identifies the importance of the grids (power, social, and media and communications) to which we are all connected and shows that disasters bring people closer together, causing them to reassess their relationships to the technological infrastructure and to their own community. An optional purchase for media studies and technology collections and for libraries located in the Northeast. Eva Lautemann, Georgia Perimeter Coll., Clarkston
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (September 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300089775
• ISBN-13: 978-0300089776
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,365,446 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A blend of natural disaster, history and scholarly analysis, February 6, 2002

By 

L. Karnay "lkarnay" (Warrenton, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Grid and the Village: Losing Electricity, Finding Community, Surviving Disaster (Hardcover)

For the most part, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I heard Mr. Farina being interviewed recently on public radio and the subject of his book sounded interesting. Although I do not normally like a mix of fictional but fact-based historical narrative with a personal (I was there) account of events, it moves this story along. Mr. Farina does an excellent job of making you think about all those electronic luxuries that we take for granted. Where the power comes from. How is it transmitted. What this place was like before electricity. Who was here before electricity. And so on. Having experienced a natural disaster when Hurricane Hugo struck South Carolina in 1989 and being without electricity for 10 days, I can appreciate much of what Mr. Farina, his family, neighbors and residents of Potsdam, NY experienced during the ice storm of 1998. Fortunately, brutal cold was not a factor for me. I found myself looking for a map to ponder the St. Lawrence River area, especially where Louisville Landing once existed. The chapters move along, although I found the last chapter a little bit too academic in its post-ice storm analysis but Mr. Farina is a professor.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Different!, April 11, 2003

By 

Kathy O. "suzanne312" (Illinois, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Grid and the Village: Losing Electricity, Finding Community, Surviving Disaster (Hardcover)

Kind of odd. The story of a storm in New England and how it affected people who were without power. Accounts of the storm are interspersed with hsitorical-fiction vignettes about how the areas was settled. The different parts of the story were not woven together well enough.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Tells part of the story of the Great Ice Storm, July 10, 2002

By 

D. Rosenfeld (Wayland, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Grid and the Village: Losing Electricity, Finding Community, Surviving Disaster (Hardcover)

Here is what I emailed to the author:

"Just finished reading it. Thank you, excellent book.

On the next printing, please remove the attack on consumerism in the guise of a once in a 250 year storm as justification. A little absurd.

Also: how about a section on why the towers for the power transmission cables failed. Why the engineering specs were not more robust.

And, a section on what happened to house hold plumbing with arctic temperatures and no heat.

Thank you."

I didn't receive a response.