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Summary: It prompted a visit to Johnstown!
Review: I have lived near Pittsburgh for years and have been only remotely aware of the historical underpinnings of the Johnstown flood. I found this book interesting because of its many references to Pittsburgh, Pittsburghers, and Western Pennsylvania generally. This is not to suggest that the book's appeal is regional. Cambor's story gave flesh to an important historical event and showed that the flood was no "mere" weather-related event. Class distinctions and the indifference of the rich to those who worked for them were at least as much to blame. I visited Johnstown, the National Park, and the Flood Museum after reading this novel. Even the park ranger praised Cambor's historical accuracy! Standing on the lip of the remains of the dam and seeing the old South Fork Club House were particularly moving. The novel mamaged to capture the essence of an event and of a time when Frick, Mellon, and Carnegie exercised influence over the steel industry and virtually every area of the economy dependent on steel. Cambor's book was a good informative read!
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Summary: In Sunlight brings characters to life
Review: I loved this book. I especially enjoyed the fact that it was NOT a typical "disaster book". The full development of the characters brought the area of Johnstown and the flood to life. It made the flood generally more "real" to us and made it seem all the more disastrous because of the fact that it could so easily have been prevented. The stories of the characters brought the loss of life closer to home.
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Summary: Beautiful; I recommend it
Review: I was interested to see that the NY TIMES reviewer used the word "lyrical" to describe this book because that is the word that occurred to me when I finished it--and I'm not even certain what it means or why I thought of it! I only know that I started reading on Sunday afternoon and didn't stop until I was finished at bedtime. I thought it was a beautifully told tale, and I loved that the story of the actual flood was told so minimally. I found myself totally drawn into the various characters' stories while dreading what I assumed their fates would be. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
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Summary: Nice Look at a Time
Review: In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden (one of my favourite titles for a book this year) by Kathleen Cambor is, indeed, a beautiful, slowly spiralling look at western Pennsylvania in the period leading up to 1889. The lives and loves of the rich who belong to the South Fork club(Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, H. C. Frick) are juxtaposed with the working people of Johnstown in the valley. Hanging over all of this is the ultimate disaster of the dam burst. No matter how similar the two groups seem to be in their search and need for love and happiness, in the end the differences are even greater as one group controls the destinies (and the very lives) of the other. Anyone reading this book for the disaster (the reason I picked it up in the first place) will be somewhat dissappointed but, hopefully, the author's wonderful creating of a context for this time and place will slowly seduce the reader.
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Summary: A Glimpse into History
Review: In Sunlight, In a Beautiful Garden by Kathleen Cambor is a novelization of the events leading up to the horrific Johnstown Flood of 1889 in Pennsylvania when over 2200 people lost their lives. After a night of heavy rains, the South Fork Dam had broken, sending 20 million tons of water crashing down the narrow valley into Johnstown. Carrying huge chunks of debris, the wall of flood water was as high as 60 feet, moving downhill at 40 miles per hour, destroying everything in its path.In this mostly character-driven novel, the author manages to intimately acquaint us with many of the residents of the area and those who were visitors. In fact, she has managed to produce somewhat of a social history of that time and place. It is obvious that Cambor has done extensive research because, as the reader, I felt that the great attention to detail really put me into Johnstown in1889 as she set the stage for the disaster that was to come. The South Fork dam which burst was below the site of a "gentlemen's club", The South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, started by many of the wealthy industrialists of that time who lived in Pittsburgh (Frick, Carnegie, Mellon) and used by them as a mostly summer getaway. Fourteen miles up the Little Conemaugh River, on whose banks Johnstown was built, a three-mile long lake was precariously held on the side of a mountain - 450 feet higher than Johnstown - by the old South Fork Dam. The dam had been neglected and poorly maintained, and every spring there was fear that the dam might not hold. But it always had, and the supposed threat became something of a standing joke around town. Many residents of Johnstown knew of the terrible condition of the dam, as did some of the visitors, but their attempts to draw attention to the problems and the potential for disaster were in vain. It appears that the people who lived in the area just assumed that those of privilege and wealth took good care of the property, very much an assumption of "noblesse oblige" which never really happened. The author makes it clear that those of wealth, the patrons of the club, were the "bad guys" who had no interest in the people who lived below the dam....they were only concerned with the little world they had created in the mountains. They had bought the abandoned reservoir, minimally repaired the old dam, dangerously raised the lake level, and built cottages and a clubhouse in their secretive retreat. There was no question about the shoddy condition of the dam, but no successful lawsuits were ever brought against club members for its failure and the resulting deaths. Cambor manages to bring these people and the fictional town residents to life by relating their personal histories like one would peel back the layers of an onion...slowly and cautiously, revealing parts of their pasts in succeeding chapters. As a reader, one comes to really care about these people and what happens to them-- Frank Fallon, a Civil War veteran, and his family; James Talbot, an attorney for the club, who visits yearly with his wife and daughter; Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, leading industrialists of the era; and many other residents of this doomed area. She also manages to make the dam itself one of the characters in this book, describing it as a "great, organic giant....fed by mountain springs and streams that coursed through layers of the earth like arteries through limbs." The words of the title come from haunting and foreboding lines in a Maeterlinck play "I have been watching you: you were there, unconcerned perhaps, but with the strange distraught air of someone forever expecting a great misfortune, in sunlight, in a beautiful garden." All in all, despite knowing the outcome, I would recommend this book for its wonderful writing and style, and its glimpse into history.
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Summary: A remarkable achievement
Review: In this rich and beautiful novel, Kathleen Cambor takes greatest industrial disaster in U.S. history and makes is heartrendingly immediate and terribly suspenseful. Her cast of characters, from the wealthiest men in the United States to factory workers, are so fully imagined that you'll be unable to leave the book without knowing whether or not they survived the bursting of the dam that had held the river back for decades. Cambor does a lot of artful stage-setting, developing the reader's understanding of Johnstown's particular location and the construction of the dam through character. The beauty of the Pennsylvania mountain landscape is expressed by a young girl whose love for the outdoors makes her the only person from the lake to connect with someone from the town below. That young man is sparking the first unionization movement in the factories. His father and mother are both drawn to the town's librarian, a woman with a secret who helps prepare their son for college. When the dam broke it took almost an hour for the wall of water to reach Johnstown. By the time it did, the force of the flood had dragged locomotives, houses, and corpses with it. The sound must have been terrifying and there was no where to go to escape it. Cambor's handling of the disaster is masterful; she tells you enough about the fate of her characters, but not so much as to break your heart. "In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden" is a novel of complexity and grace, and it works on all levels.
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Summary: Read David McCullough's book
Review: It was a long haul reading this book. So many fictionalized relationships, so little real 1889 flood material. Don't read this one--read "The Johnstown Flood" by David McCullough. The story of the Johnstown Flood of 1889 is fascinating. It is best portrayed by the Johnstown Flood Museum with its Oscar-winning film, the museum at the Flood Memorial Site, and the soon-to-open Heritage Discovery Center. Anyone with a bit of interest in the 1889 Flood and Johnstown's role in the Industrial Revolution should come visit us, esp. during Labor Day Weekend when we have the annual Johnstown FolkFest. Call 814-539-1889 for more information. J. Oleksak, Johnstown, PA
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Summary: astounding, compelling and memorable...a modern masterpiece
Review: Late in the nineteenth century, an earthen dam dissolves under a torrential Memorial Day deluge; the resultant seventy-foot wave of water, indifferent as to what it would efface, destroys much of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Kathleen Cambor's brilliant "In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden" succeeds on numerous levels in providing physical, sociological and psyhcological understandings of this catastrophy cavalierly caused by the greed, arrogance and brutal indifference of America's new industrial titans, the very captains of industry revered in the heady capitalistic period following the Civil War. Written with uncommon precision, compassion and insight, the novel completely captures the reader's imagination, trasporting one to Johnstown, an industrial city that houses a steel factory that devours its workers, and an aristrocratic summer resort, home of Pittsburgh's wealthy seeking escape from the inferno-like conditions of that steel city. Ms. Cambor's characters are fully realized people; their conflicts express universal themes. The writing is unfailing in its descriptions of the setting; eloquent and soaring in places, the novel is evidence of a writer who truly works for her readers. There can be no mistaking the author's anger at the appalling indifference and disdain the wealthy plutocrats express towards the working men and women of Johnstown. Safely ensconced in the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, eerily icy men such as Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon enjoy the trappings of summer idylls while maintaining an absolute indifference to the consequences of their ease. The wealthy who summer at the club, with few exceptions, are symbolically as corrupt and insubstantial as the dam which provides the artificial lake around which their affairs are planned. Cambor captures the evil of social invisbility persuasively; one of the hidden delights of "In Sunlight..." is its subtle class consciousness and bitter recognition that even when "natural" disasters strike, the poor invariably get hit harder. As cogent as Ms. Cambor's sociological observations are, her psychological explorations are even more profound. In parallel stories, "In Sunlight..." examines the causes and consequences of dissolving marriages. Frank and Julia Fallon bring divergent backgrounds to their union, and the catastrophic stresses wrought by a diptheria outbreak (exquisitely detailed through the eyes of the distraught Julia) led to a slow, painful loss of love and connection. James and Evelyn Talbot contrast vividly. Repressed and lonely, aggressive in their pursuit of status, their marriage disintegrates as the husband discovers conscience. That their offspring, the proud, inquisitive and introspective Daniel and the quietly inisitent Nora become attracted to each other is one of the delights of the novel. Delicate, compelling and lyrical, "In Sunlight..." firmly establishes Kathleen Cambor's reputation. This work is nothing less than astounding.
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Summary: A Disappointment
Review: Let's face it, when writing bout the Johnstown flood, the flood is the focal point. The attempt to develop fictional characters, and involve us in their pre-flood lives, falls flat. The characters are muddled and their interaction sterile. You just don't care. There is barely a mention of the dam and leaks and any threat of flood.
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Summary: Money begets tragedy, and gets away with it
Review: On Memorial Day in 1889, above the town of Johnstown, Pa, the South Fork dam burst nearly wiping out the town itself and many smaller towns downriver. Thousands were killed, livestock decimated and the township's buildings, homes and infrastructure were literally wiped off the face of the earth. Those that survived the initial assault were tested furthur as the cold night bore down on them. Shivering, injured, separated from loved ones, thirsty from the lack of potable water, left without food, desperate for medicine, bandages and clothes, they huddled together praying to make it until morning. While waters swirled around them, the structures they managed to seek refuge in threatened to collapse, casting off the survivors into black, raging waters. Even worse were those trapped inside structures and wedged downstream against the low bridge. Fires had ignited from the still burning stoves of homes knocked off their foundations. Massed in a huge jam, people burned to death and their screams could be heard throughout what was remaining of the town. This was a tragedy of immense proportions. The real tragedy is that the wealthy men who were ultimately responsible for the maintainance of the dam failed to make the dam safe. The luxury of having a recreational and fishing lake were granted only to those rich enough to afford to vacation at the "club", and the area was strictly denied to any trespassers not registered with the fishing and hunting club. Little to no consideration was given to the THOUSANDS of people below the dam, nor their homes, their animals and their livlihoods. It is inconceivable that such callous disregard existed and that these "important" men got away with such transgressions!! I guess I should not be surprised, as the foundation was set, and the same kind of disregard exists today as the corporate rich rob and plunder their companies at the expense of the working people. Skillfully revealed, the author makes no mistake as to who is responsible. Delightfully entertaining, there are intriguing characters to lighten the impact of such a horrific event.
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