38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A remarkable achievement, January 17, 2001
This review is from: In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden (Hardcover)
In this rich and beautiful novel, Kathleen Cambor takes greatest industrial disaster in U.S. history and makes is heartrendingly immediate and terribly suspenseful. Her cast of characters, from the wealthiest men in the United States to factory workers, are so fully imagined that you'll be unable to leave the book without knowing whether or not they survived the bursting of the dam that had held the river back for decades.
Cambor does a lot of artful stage-setting, developing the reader's understanding of Johnstown's particular location and the construction of the dam through character. The beauty of the Pennsylvania mountain landscape is expressed by a young girl whose love for the outdoors makes her the only person from the lake to connect with someone from the town below. That young man is sparking the first unionization movement in the factories. His father and mother are both drawn to the town's librarian, a woman with a secret who helps prepare their son for college.
When the dam broke it took almost an hour for the wall of water to reach Johnstown. By the time it did, the force of the flood had dragged locomotives, houses, and corpses with it. The sound must have been terrifying and there was no where to go to escape it. Cambor's handling of the disaster is masterful; she tells you enough about the fate of her characters, but not so much as to break your heart.
"In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden" is a novel of complexity and grace, and it works on all levels.
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38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Glimpse into History, January 26, 2001
This review is from: In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden (Hardcover)
In Sunlight, In a Beautiful Garden by Kathleen Cambor is a novelization of the events leading up to the horrific Johnstown Flood of 1889 in Pennsylvania when over 2200 people lost their lives. After a night of heavy rains, the South Fork Dam had broken, sending 20 million tons of water crashing down the narrow valley into Johnstown. Carrying huge chunks of debris, the wall of flood water was as high as 60 feet, moving downhill at 40 miles per hour, destroying everything in its path.
In this mostly character-driven novel, the author manages to intimately acquaint us with many of the residents of the area and those who were visitors. In fact, she has managed to produce somewhat of a social history of that time and place. It is obvious that Cambor has done extensive research because, as the reader, I felt that the great attention to detail really put me into Johnstown in1889 as she set the stage for the disaster that was to come.
The South Fork dam which burst was below the site of a "gentlemen's club", The South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, started by many of the wealthy industrialists of that time who lived in Pittsburgh (Frick, Carnegie, Mellon) and used by them as a mostly summer getaway.
Fourteen miles up the Little Conemaugh River, on whose banks Johnstown was built, a three-mile long lake was precariously held on the side of a mountain - 450 feet higher than Johnstown - by the old South Fork Dam. The dam had been neglected and poorly maintained, and every spring there was fear that the dam might not hold. But it always had, and the supposed threat became something of a standing joke around town.
Many residents of Johnstown knew of the terrible condition of the dam, as did some of the visitors, but their attempts to draw attention to the problems and the potential for disaster were in vain. It appears that the people who lived in the area just assumed that those of privilege and wealth took good care of the property, very much an assumption of "noblesse oblige" which never really happened.
The author makes it clear that those of wealth, the patrons of the club, were the "bad guys" who had no interest in the people who lived below the dam....they were only concerned with the little world they had created in the mountains. They had bought the abandoned reservoir, minimally repaired the old dam, dangerously raised the lake level, and built cottages and a clubhouse in their secretive retreat. There was no question about the shoddy condition of the dam, but no successful lawsuits were ever brought against club members for its failure and the resulting deaths.
Cambor manages to bring these people and the fictional town residents to life by relating their personal histories like one would peel back the layers of an onion...slowly and cautiously, revealing parts of their pasts in succeeding chapters. As a reader, one comes to really care about these people and what happens to them-- Frank Fallon, a Civil War veteran, and his family; James Talbot, an attorney for the club, who visits yearly with his wife and daughter; Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, leading industrialists of the era; and many other residents of this doomed area.
She also manages to make the dam itself one of the characters in this book, describing it as a "great, organic giant....fed by mountain springs and streams that coursed through layers of the earth like arteries through limbs."
The words of the title come from haunting and foreboding lines in a Maeterlinck play "I have been watching you: you were there, unconcerned perhaps, but with the strange distraught air of someone forever expecting a great misfortune, in sunlight, in a beautiful garden."
All in all, despite knowing the outcome, I would recommend this book for its wonderful writing and style, and its glimpse into history.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A beautifully written book!, April 6, 2002
This review is from: In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden (Hardcover)
I don't recall ever hearing much about the Johnstown Flood in 1889 and I am embarrassed to say so. However, I am glad that I had an opportunity to read this beautifully written book. And I was able to get a small glimpse of what the flood was about over 200 years ago.
Kathleen Cambor writes with prose on a select few characters whose lives are entertwined with the Club and Johnstown. She also writes with passion ~~ diviluging subtle sides to the rich men involved in this tragedy as well as men who protested against the building of the lake which ended up overflowing and killing almost 2,000 people during a Memorial Day rainstorm. There is Nora, the daughter of one of the lawyers who protested for the repairs on the dam ~~ whose life became entangled with Daniel Fallon, who lost his whole family in the flood. There is Andrew Mellon pining away for his dead financee; Andrew Carnegie entrapped by his mother's rule; Henry Clay Frick whose main concern is his comfort and prosperity. Cambor brings them all to life within this novel.
If you are a fan of historical fiction like I am ~~ I highly recommend reading this book. It will spark an interest in a tragedy that happened long ago and it was a tragedy that could have been prevented ~~ if men weren't so obstinate in denying that there was a problem. Even today, one cannot still imagine the depth of human lives lost ~~ it's too much to comprehend. But Cambor gave some of the victims voices in which they could share their lives, dreams, goals and aspirations. You can hear their voices haunting you as you read this book.
I think this is a must-read. It's not slow-paced like I feared ~~ it was very moving and the story sweeps you along with the voices and soon, you realize the tragedy is not just in the fact that the dam failed ~~ but in the fact that men simply don't care.
4-6-02
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