Curse of the Narrows

by Laura M. MacDonald

Book Overview

Before Hiroshima, there was Halifax. In 1917 the busy Canadian port was crowded with ships leaving for war-torn Europe. On December 6, two of them, the Mont Blanc and the Imo, collided in the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802714587
• ISBN13: 9780802714589
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Walker & Company
• Length: 355 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Superb

Totally engrossing. A heck of a tale, and all true. And the medical detail is wonderful. Chloroform! I am lucky that a Canadian friend gave me this book for Christmas.

Survivors

My Grandparents, my mother and her two brothers lived through the Halifax Explosion. They were among the few families that survived intact. Ms Mac Donald's book "put flesh" on the stories which we heard as young people. My Grandmother went to her death still with glass in her throatfrom that occasion. Reading the story in this narrative form made it come alive in an interesting way.

Excellent

This is an exemplary and very interesting bit of historical writing. Oddly enough, I have a couple of other books on massive industrial explosions, including the Texas City disaster in 1947 and the explosion of the Ft. Stikine in Bombay harbor in 1944. MacDonald's book is by far the best. It's well organized, gracefully written, and mediates between the perspectives of the present and the lessons of the past in a particularly sensitive way. Most importantly, I think, it treats those caught up in the disaster with the utmost respect, avoiding the easiest trap for writers of historical non-fiction: the unconscious assumption that people in the past, because they wore funny clothes and had attitudes strange to us, were somehow quaint and not as bright as we are. MacDonald tells this story with great compassion and insight without milking it for melodrama (which would have been very easy). Because she allows the past to speak for itself whenever possible, there are some really thought-provoking bits to those interested in modern disaster planning. I found it particularly interesting that the Red Cross of that day, for example, strongly preferred to work with citizen committees rather than political leaders, regarding the latter as being nearly useless because of the way they start to pursue their own agendas the instant in the initial shock wears off. As a military history buff, I've known about the explosion of the Mont Blanc for a long time. I'm really glad to have such a wonderful book on it.

wonderful informative book

This bit of history, was unknown to me, untuil I read the book. The author succeeds in transporting you back in time. I felt like I was living within the time frame of the tragic events of this explosion. Very powerfully written. I would highly recommend this book

Another City Unprepared For A Disaster

Ms. MacDonald has researched the definitive account of the destruction of the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia during World War I. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong : from the right two ships colliding (one of them carrying nearly 3,000 tons of munitions) to the bomb ship drifting to Halifax before exploding and the blizzard that struck the City afterwards. The disorganized search and rescue attempts through the snowstorm of the City in rubble (think of the destruction caused by hurricanes or by an atomic bomb) takes up the last half of the book. Nearly 2,000 people were killed by the blast with disabling injuries for the thousands of survivors. Ms. MacDonald writes of her native City with more detail than was perhaps necessary but the story is a page-turner and serves as a warning to the reader that life has not changed much in terms of disaster relief over the past century.