From Publishers Weekly
On September 1, 1894, Hinckley, Minn.—a thriving town with a population of more than 1,200, two railroads, a successful lumber mill and five hotels—was ravaged by a firestorm that grew out of a catastrophic convergence of two ordinary fires, high winds, hot weather and white pine forest. Brown, a textbook writer, gives a human face to natural calamity as he draws on firsthand survivor stories, such as those of his grandfather, who at nine was rescued from the disaster that killed his father, a Norwegian immigrant. A wide range of characters evoke the reader's pity and respect in these well-researched and highly readable pages. A black porter selflessly saves white passengers on a train engulfed in flames; a quick-thinking clergyman plunges into a river with a stranger's baby in his arms; and a survivor is haunted by the death screams of 127 of his neighbors in a swamp. With its pine forests obliterated in the firestorm that claimed more than 436 lives, Hinckley became a specter of its former self. Illustrated with period pictures, this deft slice of regional history will attract disaster and weather buffs as well as fans of Norman Maclean's standout
Young Men and Fire.
(May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
*Starred Review* In 1894, smoke and the reek of it weren't unusual in the northernmost U.S. with its miles of pine forest. Lumber companies pursued the equivalent of strip-mining, sans any cleanup, and in hot, dry weather, branches stripped from trunks and the -forest-floor detritus became tinder for hundreds of sudden fires. On September 1, two big fires south of Hinckley, Minnesota, combined under weather conditions conducive to firestorms. By nightfall, Hinckley and three nearby hamlets were no more. More than 436 persons were incinerated, and some 400 square miles were so thoroughly burned that the soil was rendered useless. Brown, whose maternal grandfather was an 11-year-old survivor, tells the story of that day in clean, precise, fluid prose, maintaining focus on those who fled to communicate some of their terror as they ran from flames moving as fast as they and sometimes lethally faster. He weaves together the movements of his forebears and other Pine County residents as they fled, took shelter, and survived, were rescued, or perished, and the countermovements of the heroic train crews who came to their rescue. He also judiciously inserts explanations of such matters as firestorms, Norway-to-Minnesota immigration, death by burning, and an even more destructive precursor of the Hinckley disaster. Riveting, moving, white-knuckle reading to rank with classic accounts of the "perfect storm," Krakatoa, and other storied calamities.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
