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A review by natchgreyes
Ruthless Tide: The Heroes and Villains of the Johnstown Flood, America's Astonishing Gilded Age Disaster by Al Roker
2.0
Here's what Gary Provost wrote about writing -
“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”
This is how this book is written -
"In the spring of 1889, when an event whose only comparisons were biblical descriptions of the awful Last Day of Judgment came rushing into Johnstown, few people in the valley knew for certain who belonged to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, the private retreat up on the mountain, with its marvelous, sparkling artificial lake. Almost all of the club's members lived in Pittsburgh, not Johnstown, and they weren't the kind of men who wanted their private affairs bandied about for all to see."
Whew! It's a long series of paragraphs of run-on sentences. And, what's more, they're repetitive. For example, one section reads -
"Yet those even those human alterations of nature, with so many unintended consequences, don't give us the ultimate cause of the sudden, horrific loss of life, and the stunning loss of so much else nature and human-made, that occurred so fast when the towering monster that became the Great Johnstown Flood was unleashed.
[New paragraph w/short sentence] Nothing like that horror would have occurred had the dam at the South Fork Creek...not let go, all at once...
[New paragraph beginning] Had the dam up on the mountain not broken..."
Ugh.
This could have been a really great book. The premise is interesting - a flood of biblical proportions which wiped out a town and saw the formation of the Red Cross as a consequence - but the run-on sentences and repetitive writing is just exhausting.
More nitpicky is the way the book frames the characters. It's very antiseptic. For example, one of the first characters introduced is Gertrude, the mischevious 6-year daughter of James Quinn, a wealthy dry goods proprietor and one of the few people in town worried about the dam's collapse. In describing her background and lead-up to the flood, the author introduces elements of first person - for instance, calling her father "papa" - but leaving the story third person and focusing on the relationships between her and her family members from a very outsider perspective. It feels more like a news report about some people affected by the flood instead of a living, breathing story about their experiences. I can't fault the author for that. He is a news reporter by training. But, it makes the story less engaging.
Overall, this wasn't really a book for me.
“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”
This is how this book is written -
"In the spring of 1889, when an event whose only comparisons were biblical descriptions of the awful Last Day of Judgment came rushing into Johnstown, few people in the valley knew for certain who belonged to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, the private retreat up on the mountain, with its marvelous, sparkling artificial lake. Almost all of the club's members lived in Pittsburgh, not Johnstown, and they weren't the kind of men who wanted their private affairs bandied about for all to see."
Whew! It's a long series of paragraphs of run-on sentences. And, what's more, they're repetitive. For example, one section reads -
"Yet those even those human alterations of nature, with so many unintended consequences, don't give us the ultimate cause of the sudden, horrific loss of life, and the stunning loss of so much else nature and human-made, that occurred so fast when the towering monster that became the Great Johnstown Flood was unleashed.
[New paragraph w/short sentence] Nothing like that horror would have occurred had the dam at the South Fork Creek...not let go, all at once...
[New paragraph beginning] Had the dam up on the mountain not broken..."
Ugh.
This could have been a really great book. The premise is interesting - a flood of biblical proportions which wiped out a town and saw the formation of the Red Cross as a consequence - but the run-on sentences and repetitive writing is just exhausting.
More nitpicky is the way the book frames the characters. It's very antiseptic. For example, one of the first characters introduced is Gertrude, the mischevious 6-year daughter of James Quinn, a wealthy dry goods proprietor and one of the few people in town worried about the dam's collapse. In describing her background and lead-up to the flood, the author introduces elements of first person - for instance, calling her father "papa" - but leaving the story third person and focusing on the relationships between her and her family members from a very outsider perspective. It feels more like a news report about some people affected by the flood instead of a living, breathing story about their experiences. I can't fault the author for that. He is a news reporter by training. But, it makes the story less engaging.
Overall, this wasn't really a book for me.