Washed Away

January 7, 2013
In his attempt to humanize the Great Flood of 1913, the natural disaster that devastated hundreds of towns in more than a dozen states and claimed over 700 lives, Williams (C.C. Pyle’s Amazing Foot Race) often drifts off course. His narrative, which spans just six spring days, details the myriad forms of destruction visited upon the land by tornadoes, torrential rains, and subsequent floods, and he frequently pauses to flesh out backstories and grisly fates. But his digressions, like the deluge, often go too far afield and oversaturate the tale; Civil War soldiers wander in, Mark Twain makes an appearance, and a veritable ark of circus animals fight to survive. Williams’s style ranges from formal to chatty, and his interweaving of pithy commentary and personal speculation makes it occasionally difficult to parse extensive research and firsthand accounts from Williams’s narrative embellishments. There’s plenty of fascinating ephemera, but Williams’s flood suffers from something folks struggling to stay afloat in 1913 would’ve understood all too well: too much of a good thing. 16 pages of photos. Agent: Laurie Abkemeier, DeFiore and Company.

February 1, 2013
Of the major natural catastrophes of the early twentieth century, the Great Flood of 1913 is one of the least remembered. Over several days in March of that year, heavy rains with fierce winds and tornadoes caused severe flooding in 14 states. Before the storm abated, rain turned to snow. Every major river east of the Mississippi rose, many bridges washed away, and fallen telegraph and telephone lines isolated towns and cities in need of outside help. Hundreds of people died between Nebraska and Vermont from drowning, fires, freezing temperatures, accidents, and suicide. Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania were the hardest-hit states. Williams weaves tragic and heroic stories of people in the various affected states into an almost hour-by-hour account of the deadly storm. This quick-reading history published for the storm's centennial should interest readers who enjoyed Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm (1999), about the Galveston hurricane of 1900, or Simon Winchester's A Crack in the Edge of the World (2005), about the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

December 15, 2012
Deeply researched, personal accounts of the Midwestern natural disaster whose ramifications can be felt today. Journalist Williams (C.C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America, 2007) offers an eerily prescient work that comes in the wake of another storm of the century, Hurricane Sandy. In mid-March 1913, a series of tornadoes accompanied by a deluge of rain on saturated, thawing ground caused inordinate damage to a swath of Ohio and Indiana, impacting both neighboring states and those as far away as Vermont and New Jersey and leaving approximately 1,000 dead and untold damage to the heartland. Williams has delved into the archives and extracted the stories of survivors and many who perished, tragedies witnessed by many and recorded in newspapers, books and memories passed down. The beginnings could be felt on March 23, in Omaha, Neb., when a twister ripped through town and killed 140 people and destroyed thousands of homes; other tornadoes wreaked havoc from Chicago to Terre Haute, followed by a downpour that swelled the rivers, coursing rapidly through towns. Williams pummels readers with countless anecdotes and pursues the fates of such characters as the Red Cross' national director Ernest P. Bicknell, who scrambled in the field to lend aid, or the young residents of the Allen County Orphans' Home in Fort Wayne, Ind. The author also looks at the lessons taken from the aftermath, such as the work of engineer Arthur E. Morgan, who implemented a revolutionary flood-control system for the region. A well-honed chronicle of a significant national disaster, especially timely following the destruction of Sandy.

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