Wish List 5: The Johnstown Flood

Once a month I am planning on sharing with you all 5 of my biggest wish list books broken up by theme. I know that you all need more on your TBR!!! This month's theme focuses on the natural disaster event, the Johnstown Flood.  I have read 2 books about this event previously, one fiction (In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden by Kathleen Cambor) and one non-fiction (The Johnstown Flood by David McCullouch) and have been fascinated by the event.  There is so much opportunity for potential drama here and it is an oft forgotten event that I would love to see how other fiction authors treat it.  There is even a YA novel on this list purely because I was surprised by it!

Summer of Gold and Water by Kathleen Danielcyzk

'Its gone, the dam is gone, I can't believe it. It just broke, and all that water...' Michael sat down heavily on the steps and started to cry. Sarah Green knows her place. She's a hard worker born of hard-working parents and married to an honest, blue-collar man who loves her. It is no surprise to those who know her when she is hired by one of Philadelphia's richest--and most eccentric--families as their first maid. Sarah has complete confidence she can sew, cook, and clean, but can she handle the other responsibilities her new employers, Wesley and Eloise Danvers, request of her? Confidant. Counselor. Friend. Whenever Eloise gains an inch, earning a bit more of Sarah's trust and friendship, she takes a mile. Before Sarah has fully acclimated to being friends with her employer, she and her family are spending summers at an exclusive club as members with the Danverses! The summers are uncomfortable for Sarah as she struggles to make nice with Philadelphia's richest matrons and watches her only daughter interact with their daughters and sons. The Danverses brush off her worries, insisting that they love the Greens and their friends do too. Not until an act of man and nature strikes do the Greens and Danverses see the social divide for what it is and are faced with the challenge of breaching it in the Summer of Gold and Water.

Wade in the Water by Michael Stephen Oates

It is spring in the year 1889, and Americans are enjoying the spoils of an industrial revolution, but in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the wheels of industry are brought to a grinding halt when the River Fork dam bursts. Bennett Marsh, a nineteen-year-old kitchen-hand, wants nothing more than to leave his home town of River Fork and attend the Julliard School of Music in New York. Bennett's father, Percival, a steel-mill worker lured by the glamour of high society, is trapped in a dead-end job, and struggles to find his place as parent and provider. John Parke, the resident engineer at the River Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, questions the integrity of the dam while his gadabout wife and upper crust club members wine and dine around him in ignorant bliss. When a storm out of Kansas inundates the valley with torrential rain, Parke's greatest fear comes true. Twenty million tons of water spill into the Allegheny Valley, devastating the lives of the 30,000 people living below it. When the dam breaks, Bennett and Percival must count on each other to survive the flood, realizing the bond between them and the strength they take from each other, but it may have come too late."

The Wedding Quilt Bride by Colleen Coble

The Wedding Quilt Bride is one of Coble’s early novellas. Faith Cole makes a visit to her great-grandmother to Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889. Convinced her disability will keep her from ever marrying, Faith shuns the hope in her mother’s wedding trunk. But the threat from a dangerous dam brings her out of her shyness, and she finds God has other plans.







Waterproof by Judith Redline Coopey

Fifty years after an earthen dam collapsed sending a thirty foot wall of raging destruction down on the city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Pamela McRae looks back on the tragedy. The flood wiped out Pam's fondest hopes: her brother and her fiance were killed. Her mother is locked in catatonic hysteria. Her father, torn apart by the flood's affect on his family, just walks away, leaving Pam poverty stricken and alone, to care for a mother who may never recover. Then Davy Hughes, Pam's dead fiance, reappears and, instead of being the answer to her prayers, further complicates her life. Someone is seeking revenge on the owners of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, the Pittsburgh millionaires who owned the failed dam, and Pam thinks Davy might have something to do with it. Waterproof, set in Johnstown two years after the flood, examines how people react to tragedy. Do they recover from physical injury only to succumb to the psychological affects? Or do they run away? Do they rise to the challenge and become better people or give in to their rage and seek revenge? For the people of Johnstown, survivors of the flood, it became the measure of their character. Determined to get past the tragedy and get on with her life, Pam spurns self-pity. She will not be defined by the flood. In this decades-deep story of loss and struggle against loss, we find a heroine to respect and a path to recovery.

The Terrible Wave by Marden Dahlstedt

During the disastrous flood of 1889 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a spoiled teenage girl learns to accept responsibility as she and her companions search for their families and friends.
 
Have you read any of these? Any other novels about the Johnstown Flood you would add to this list?

 







Looking for some books I have read on the Johnstown Flood?   Give these a try!

In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden               The Johnstown Flood            
          ★★★½☆☆                          ★★★★☆  

 Here are some of the wishlists from a few of my friends this month:

• Magdalena @ A Bookaholic Swede - Steampunk
  
• Holly @ 2 Kids and Tired - Books Set in Russia
  
• Colleen @ A Literary Vacation - Female Spies of WWII
• Stephanie @ Layered Pages -The American Civil War

Copyright © 2016 by The Maiden’s Court

Audiobook Review: In Sunlight, In A Beautiful Garden by Kathleen Cambor

In Sunlight, In a Beautiful Garden by Kathleen Cambor

Unabridged, 10 hr. 27 min.

Brilliance Audio

James Daniels (Narrator)

October 24, 2008

★★★½☆☆

 

Genre: Historical Fiction

Source: Downloaded from Audible (personal purchase)

An Elegantly Crafted Love Story Set in Post-Civil War America. In Sunlight, In a Beautiful Garden tells of a bittersweet romance set against the backdrop of the greatest industrial disaster in American history: the construction and subsequent collapse in 1889 of the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, dam. It was a tragedy that cost 2,200 lives, implicated some of the most illustrious financiers of the day - Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon - whose carelessness contributed to the disaster, and irreparably changed the lives of those who survived it. This is the story of these men and of the families who lived in the shadow of the dam: the daughter of the lawyer who filed the charter for an exclusive club on the shore of the artificially created lake; the Quaker steel mill owner who tried to stop the dam's construction; a librarian, escaping to a bustling mountain city from a loveless life in Boston; a young man determined to expose and undermine the greed and carelessness that shaped the last years of the nineteenth century. A cautionary tale for our new century, In Sunlight, In a Beautiful Garden is a story of youthful promise and devastating loss, of power and its misuse, and of greed and the philanthropy that is too often a guilty by-product.

 
Before I properly start this review, I wanted to point out that I am posting this today because it is the day after the 127th anniversary of the Johnstown Flood - May 31, 1889 - and I wanted to share something relevant.  I also previously reviewed, The Johnstown Flood, by David McCullough which is a very good non-fiction account of the Flood, which you can read if you are interested in a factual accounting of the disaster itself.  One of these days I will get around to visiting the national memorial and museum.  Now back to the review!

 
This novel was a little bit different from what I expected of it; instead of being acutely focused on the events that transpired during and after the Johnstown Flood, it is a character driven novel based primarily on the lead up to the flood (although the aftermath is considered in lesser detail). While reading the book, I remember thinking that it didn’t feel like a book about a disaster at all, and I have read my fair share; the events of the flood itself come just a few pages prior to the end of the book. Primarily, it’s a story of life in rural/suburban Pennsylvania during a time when real wealth was being complied by the oil, steel, and railroad tycoons, which the everyman toiled, and went on strike, and lived day to day. This is very clearly evoked by the prose of this novel. There is also a thread about growing up and young summer love that twists throughout the plot.

As a reader, you become committed to these characters whose lives are destroyed following the flood, which inevitably occurs in the late pages of the book. These characters represent two essentially distinct groups: those of privilege who enjoy the country club that the South Fork Dam was built to please during the summer months, and the common man living their everyday life in the town below the Dam. The author doesn’t make the wealthy a clear cut bad guy, but she does depict them as careless (which they were) for not being worried about the reports about the safety of the Dam, because it didn’t affect them. I found the storyline relating to those from the town, particularly Frank Fallon and his family, to be more interesting than the laconic life above the Dam because there appeared to be more happening in their lives.

I would have liked more of a resolution to the novel. As the flood occurs so late in the novel, I was looking for more of the aftermath, but what I got was more of a dropped thread. Being that these characters were the focus of the story, rather than the event, I would have liked to have more about the effect on those who did live through it. You don’t need all the grisly details in an emotionally evocative book like this, but I needed a little more than I got. While this book might not have been what I expected going in to it, I did enjoy the experience of reading it.

Also, as a side note, I’m still confused by the title.

★★★★☆

James Daniels does a very good job with the narration here. He enunciates very clearly with a comfortable pause between sentences. It doesn’t feel rushed, but his pacing does help to speed up the flow of the narrative that could sometimes feel a little bogged down otherwise. Beyond that, there isn’t much to say about the narration. It wasn’t a particularly memorable performance, but not bad either.

You can listen to a sample of the audiobook below (press the play button):

Reviews of this book by other bloggers:

• Story Circle Book Reviews

Buy the Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | RJ Julia

 
Also by Kathleen Cambor:

The Book of Mercy

Find Kathleen Cambor: Agency Website

 
 


Copyright © 2016 by The Maiden’s Court

Book Review: The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough

The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough
Unabridged, 9 hr. 4 min.
Simon & Schuster Audio
Edward Herrmann (Narrator)
June 17, 2005
★★★★☆

Genre: Non-Fiction
Source: Downloaded audiobook from Audible

At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Despite repeated warnings of possible danger, nothing was done about the dam. Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain, smashing through Johnstown, and killing more than 2,000 people. It was a tragedy that became a national scandal.
Graced by David McCullough's remarkable gift for writing richly textured, sympathetic social history, The Johnstown Flood is an absorbing, classic portrait of life in nineteenth-century America, of overweening confidence, of energy, and of tragedy. It also offers a powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the danger of assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they are necessarily behaving responsibly.

I have this thing about disaster stories – I get drawn in and can’t stop reading! The Johnstown Flood is no different. David McCullough weaves an utterly fascinating, and at the same time heartbreaking, tale of this disaster that did not have to happen. The residents of Johnstown faced an enormous wall of water and fire and destruction hurtling their way in the middle of the night, with nothing that could be done to stop it except to try and get out of its way. There were so many stories of people who just missed the destruction and those who somehow managed to hang on and survive the devastation.
While I wouldn’t say that any of the individual people stood out to me, the experience of the people as a whole and their resolve to survive and rebuild was striking and that is what I remember from the reading experience.  It's a story of how something done for the wealthy (creating a dam to create a country club) ultimately affected the everyday people of Johnstown.
While this book might not be one of his award winning ones, The Johnstown Flood is a well told narrative of a great American industrial age disaster that is mostly forgotten about by people today.

★★★★★

Within the first couple of minutes of the narration I knew that I had heard this narrator before and I wasn’t wrong. Edward Herrmann has narrated several other McCullough books as well as Doris Kearns Goodwin, Walter Issacson, and Erik Larson. And Erik Larson is where I had heard him before (I also heard his narration in The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin), in another epic disaster book, Isaac’s Storm. This narrator has a way of reading that could bring even the driest material to life, so given an exciting narrative, he blows it away. The drama feels even bigger and more…well…dramatic! I highly recommend, pretty much any book Herrmann narrates!
If you would like to preview the story before reading it, why not try out an excerpt of the book?  Simon & Schuster has both a print excerpt AND and audio sample on the books page.
Additionally, McCullough speaks about the book in this short video:

Reviews of this book by other bloggers:

• Zoo Station
• What Would the Founders Think?

Buy the Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | RJ Julia

Also by David McCullough:

1776

Brave Companions

John Adams

Mornings on Horseback

The Course of Human Events

The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

The Wright Brothers

The Great Bridge

The Path Between the Seas

Truman

Find David McCullough: Website | Facebook |



Copyright © 2015 by The Maiden’s Court