From Publishers Weekly
In American history books, October 8, 1871, marks the massive fire that consumed Chicago. But as Gess (Good Deeds) and Lutz (Doublespeak) document in this thorough historical narrative, it was also the night a fledgling Wisconsin mining town endured a worse fate a story often overlooked in the annals of fire. Peshtigo, with a population of nearly 2,000, was obliterated in less than an hour that night by a freakish convergence of rampant forest fires and tornado-force winds. Gess and Lutz draw on a wealth of local sources, including diaries, interviews with survivors and newspaper accounts, to enliven their story and forge a cast of main characters. While the authors go into far too much detail in describing the town's founding and its politics, they render a chilling, absorbing account of the hellish events of the night itself, perhaps due to Gess's background as a novelist: " `Faster than it takes to write these words' is the phrase every survivor used. They used it to describe the speed of a fireball hitting a house and setting it into instant flames; they used it to describe the speed with which one house was lifted from its foundation, then thrown through the air `a hundred feet' before it detonated midflight and sent strips of flaming wood flying like shrapnel.... They used it to describe the sight of a small boy, separated from his family, and how he knelt to the ground, crouching in prayer before fire lit his body." The images of the catastrophe are often as unpleasant as they are vivid, but readers will sense that they are necessary and that Gess and Lutz have done an overdue service to those who suffered.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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Because it occurred on the same night as Chicago's more famous blaze, the deadliest forest conflagration in American history is not well known. Gess and Lutz estimate that about 2,500 people died in the Peshtigo, Wisconsin, fire of 1871, but it is impossible to know the death toll with certainty because the destruction was so complete and the first-person accounts so sparse. Yet the authors creditably reconstruct the extant testimony into a moving narrative of the calamity and its causes. As aficionados of disaster tales appreciate, our attraction to such stories derives in part from incredulity at the element of human complacency or folly involved: at Peshtigo, the rampant logging of the latter 1800s left combustible litter everywhere. An ignored harbinger of doom was smoke wafting eastward from Minnesota prairie fires, accompanied by an increasingly ruddy western sky. Quickening their narrative with an approaching cyclonic weather system, the authors sketch people dropping their daily tasks to attempt to escape from the roaring flames and fireballs. An ably crafted addition to disaster tales that is not for the faint-hearted.
Gilbert TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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