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 |



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