The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin

The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin is a fascinating meld of weather, the immigrant experience in the United States, the politics of a burgeoning government bureaucracy, and the horror of death by freezing.

In 1888, a blizzard hit the plains states of the Dakotas, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Minnesota with explosive and deadly suddenness. The drop in temperature was so precipitous and the blast of frozen moisture from the sky so overwhelming, that children coming home from school were literally frozen in their tracks and animals suffocated from ice crystals clogging their nostrils.

Lured to the Great Plains by glowing advertisements from the United States government and the railroads of lush land in exchange for homesteading, entire villages in the Ukraine, Germany, and Norway uprooted themselves and were transplanted in Kansas, Dakota, and southwest Minnesota. The immigrants from these villages soon learned that the land they settled on would be purchased with their lives. Life on the Great Plains was not lush but harsh beyond their imaginings. So much so, that Laskin has referred to the populating of the American plains as a great “failed experiment.” Over 60 percent of the pioneer families had left the Great Plains by 1890. Today, the population of most of the Great Plains states is now less than it was in the 1950s.

Laskin writes in heart-wrenching prose about the deaths of individual children and makes understandable the forces of nature that brought about the blizzard that killed them. However, his book becomes muddled by weaving through this narrative the clash of personalities in the newly formed and competitive Signal Corps weather service that caused the failure to warn the settlers of the magnitude of the impending storm. Nonetheless, The Children’s Blizzard is a compelling and informative read about an all-but-forgotten time in the history of the United States.

— Russ Fee

BONUS REVIEW: The Cocoanut Grove Fire by Stephanie Schorow

[This book was read as an independent study by Gary Strokosch, who is earning extra credit in his consumption of disaster stories.]

This 2005 paperback book is part of the New England Remembers series about New England history. Therefore, by design, this book is brief (74 pages), in paperback and inexpensive. My copy was loaned (free) to me by a friend, John Kulig, who similarly enjoys reading disaster books and lives and works in the greater Boston area. The two-story Cocoanut Grove nightclub was very crowded the night of the fire in November 1942 and filled with drinking and reveling patrons. In retrospect, there were few surprises once a fire got started. History has only a small impact on subsequent generations and this nightclub was a predictable disaster waiting to happen: overcrowding, flammable interiors, locked emergency doors, etc. Unfortunately, approximately 492 people lost their lives as a result of the fire, including one suicide. The author reminds us of the 1903 Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago and Rhode Island’s Station nightclub fire in 2003, calling us to watch the news and wait for the next fire disaster. This book includes a good diagram of the nightclub floor plan and a handful of photos of characters involved in the story, including Buck Jones who lost his life in the fire. Fortunately for Boston College fans, their undefeated football team lost their football game with Holy Cross of Worcester the day of the fire and did not go to the Grove to celebrate as planned. Ms. Schorow does an excellent job of telling the stories that surrounded the fire and also details the follow up of some of the seriously injured victims that tried to get their lives back together again. As is true of most disasters, new information still seems to slowly come to life long after the events of November 28, 1942. An excellent read and worth the effort.

— Gary Strokosch

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

Having recently read two classic novels about Native Americans, Oliver LaFarge’s Laughing Boy (1929) and D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded (1936), I was prepared for the general story line of Momaday’s book: young American Indian struggles to adapt to life in a society for which he has not been prepared. But I didn’t expect Faulkner. With its multiple narrators, overlapping, intertwined narratives, and frequent flashbacks, House Made of Dawn is more reminiscent of As I Lay Dying than of LaFarge or McNickle. Like the protagonists in the earlier novels, Momaday’s Abel is torn between two cultures and unable to make himself understood in “white” words. By mid-book, Abel is tongue-tied and ill-at-ease in the Los Angeles of 1952, truly a man without a country. After suffering a brutal beating while drunk (the description of his awakening and realization of his plight is horribly compelling) his friend Benally puts him on a train headed back to New Mexico and home. If Abel has a future, it will be there, and the book ends, as it began, with a blackened figure running through the landscape in winter, a ritual race of the dead. The southwestern landscape is a powerful character here — the lyrical and painstaking evocations of the country around the settlement (apparently modeled on Jemez Pueblo, where Momaday lived from the age of twelve) were a major attraction for me. A difficult, but rewarding novel, House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (as had Laughing Boy).

— Bob Karrow

Legs by William Kennedy

Legs is one of three books by Kennedy about the Albany, New York, area. The main character of the first book is Jack “Legs” Diamond, a real gangster that operated in the Albany area during Prohibition in the 1920s. Two other important characters in his life and in this book were his wife, Alice, and his girlfriend, Kiki. The reader gets to know them quite well while reading this story, which is told through the eyes of Jack’s personal attorney, Marcus. Though Jack’s women were jealous of each other, Legs graciously invited his two women to some of the same social events and on one occasion even danced with both of them at the same time. However, most of his life was not so tender. He dealt in alcohol and narcotics and made it clear to others that he meant business. In fact, after reading this book, the reader may be introduced to previously unfamiliar alternative ways to kill people. Of course, this was all in the line of business dealings and shouldn’t be judged too harshly. Unfortunately, Legs had five rather dramatic attempts on his life, and the fifth one did him in at the age of 35 in 1931. To seal the deal, Legs received three injections of lead into his head to be certain he would not be able to survive his last business transaction. Kennedy provides excellent writing, an interesting story and a look into organized crime in one area of the country during Prohibition. The book is highly recommended reading.

— Gary Strokosch

Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Reviewed by all five members during discussion at the January 13, 2009 Secret Meeting of The Ancient and Honorable Bibliophilic Society of Oak Park

References to members of the Society have been kept secret by only using their initials. The review proceeded as follows. This volume is 892 pages in length, a surprise to RF, who picked the book. It was originally published as a trilogy and later edited into a single volume under the title Shadow Country. However, though the understanding among members is that the entire book will be read by everyone prior to the monthly meeting, there was poor performance for this book. GS admitted in advance that he had no intention of going beyond Book 1, a mere 249 pages. Below is the record of achievements of the five esteemed members:

• JM — 490 pages (enjoys reading more than his pet dog)
• RF — 249 pages (selected the book)
• GS — 249 pages (lips get sore after reading)
• JA — 249 pages (retired)
• RK — 892 pages (reads while walking)