Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.