Curse of The Narrows: The Halifax Disaster of 1917

Once again, I have learned something that I had never known before reading this book: the explosion, tsunami and massive snowstorm that struck Halifax, Nova Scotia in December 1917. This is a well-written book that outlines the ship accident minute by minute, and then comprehensively details its awful aftermath. We get a story of great suffering and heroic action, particularly by the medical staffs that came to help from Boston, New York, and a host of Canadian cities. These dedicated people worked day and night without stopping to alleviate the suffering of the population of Halifax. If you wish to read a tale of heroism in the face of tremendous odds, this is the book for you.

I learned a great deal from this book concerning the disastrous explosion of an ammunition ship following a collision in the Harbor at Halifax during the First World War. The book does seem to drag just a bit at times but some of this detail may be more interesting to those with a more particular interest in the history of Halifax. My biggest complaint with the book would be the poor quality and small size of the photos included. Of greatest interest were the personal stories recounted of those who survived the disaster and it's aftermath.

I had never heard of this disaster until recently. When I picked out this book I didn't have high hopes. The last few books like this weren't very good but this was fantastic. Laura MacDonald's writing is very detailed and personalized. You can really feel for the people and what it was like because this doesn't just spout statistics at you although they are included. Books like this work so much better when they are filled with the personalized stories like this is. Anyone would love this story and I wish they would make movies out of something like this instead of other books.

My great grandparents were young people around the time of the First World War, and with the boys called away to service overseas, my great grandmother and plenty of other "land girls" were called to man the plows of the little farms in upstate New York, where a struggling rutabaga truck farm kept all the neighboring women pon the job morning, noon and night, with time only off for Sunday school and church worship at the nearest community center, some twelve miles out. My great grandmother heard the noise of the Imo explosion and never forgot it, for the mule she was behind got skeered and ran into the next man's acreage, a feat he never did again, that lazy gray mule they called Buster. The harvest was long gone, for this was the beginning of winter right after American Thanksgiving, but my great-grandmother was once again tearing up the ruts, a weekly chore even in a nor'easter or snowstorm.

"The sky was full of black dust," she swore to me, as a very old woman in the early 1970s. "Looked like a billion locusts. And then we sniffed the air and we knew, them was part of people!" Laura Mac Donald, a topnotch TV producer, has interviewed many survivors of that long ago tragedy in Halifax, many of whom suffered permanent hearing loss as a result of the fiery explosion, the shock waves of which were heard not only in the Finger Lakes but, it is said, even in the Caribbean paradises of Cuba and Santo Domingo. In truth, it was a tsunami, and the producers of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW should hold on to their footage for when the day comes and the studios want to bring this Canadian tragedy to life.

As usual, the poor people paid the most, the people of the North End who couldn't get out in time. There were so many people killed and dying that they ran out of gravediggers. Why, they even ran out of preachers, and when did that ever occur before or since? My great grandmother said the Catholics got it worst, and Mac Donald's figures show that in one parish alone, St. Joseph's, nearly five hundred members lost their lives in a single instant. "Some clergymen simply remained in or near the cemetery during the day," writes Mac Donald, "performing funerals until it got too dark to read."

And all of this in the days and weeks that should have been happy ones, the weeks before Christmas!

An inquest was held and Mac Donald somehow got hold of the complete transcript, which illuminates who was to blame and who was completely innocent. You have to know a lot about intercoastal shipping to understand this material, it's dense, like the very thickest parts of the Warren Report. Otherwise the book grips you like three magnets.

The Curse of the Narrows (MacDonald) is a great read and a wonderful source for further documentation on the Halifax disaster of 1917. I used this book (and others found in MacDonald's notes) as source documentation for my final paper in a Master's level course and was not at all disappointed in her work. At the same time, while I was doing my research, her writing kept drawing me in and I consumed pages like I was reading a novel. Rare to see both qualities present in the same work. Highly recommend this to any disaster research professionals or the mid-level reader who is looking for something outside of the box.

First, the good: Mac Donald obviously did a lot of research and delves into many aspects of the disaster, focusing on the people involved in each: the pilots and sailors on the ships, the victims on shore, the doctors and relief workers, even the administrators who organized the relief efforts. Their harrowing and often amazing stories make for a gripping narrative.

Mac Donald includes many photos which help the reader get a sense of the city and the people involved. There is an index and a list of "featured people" to help keep track of who's who, though this latter would have done more good at the front instead of in an appendix.

Now for the not-so-good: Although Mac Donald credits several editors in her acknowledgments, none of them seems to have done any copy-editing. Nearly every page has at least one typo (HMCS Nereid is consistently misspelled "Neried"), malapropism ("[General Benson] looked calm and unfettered", "Dr. Murphy skirted up the stairs"), or awkward and confusing phrasing. Chapter breaks seem to be inserted at random (one chapter has two pages of text, another 32 pages).

Perhaps an editor could have helped with another deficiency, the map. Many of the places mentioned in the text are not on the map, including such key locations as City Hall, Camp Hill Hospital, Pier 9, the military magazine, the morgue, and the train station. A slightly smaller-scale map of the entire city with these landmarks indicated would have been much more helpful than the map showing the relief train's route from Boston to Halifax. Moreover, the positions of the two ships (a third, the tug Stella Maris, is not indicated at all) do not match the text. For instance, according to the text, just before both ships whistled 3 times and went into reverse, they were 55 yards apart, but on the map these points are indicated nearly 1/4 mile (440 yards) apart.

Still, despite these shortcomings, I found the book worth reading, especially for its insights on how people behave in dire circumstances.

I had heard of this event before - the largest non-nuclear explosion in history - and had been dying to read all the details. It's a fascinating story ... A ship carrying high explosives wrecks in Halifax harbor during WWI, right before Christmas. The resulting explosion is incredible - basically, flattening the town and killing thousands. Interestingly, it's something that most people haven't heard about - or, if they have, have only the vaguest notions. What a possibility for a fascinating book.

Unfortunately, I found *this* book very uneven. It's certainly comprehensive - 300+ pages, with lots of research. And, at times, it's a real page turner (the author is a TV and film writer). I also liked the focus on the relief effort, as I knew nothing about that beforehand.

On the other hand, I don't think this is the author's metier. There is just too much detail. It was really hard to follow who was who (there are so many characters!) and what was actually going on (especially relative to the wreck and the trial).

I didn't get the feeling that the author really put the effort she should have into sifting all the information, weighing whether something should be included, and doing some real editing. I would also have liked to have more explanation and discussion. It seemed like one first-person story after another.

As far as I can tell, this is the only book about this event. Given that, I can definitely recommend this book. If you have just a casual interest, though, I'm not so sure.

This book, given all the research which obviously went into it, is not what it could have been. There is no objective analysis of the events in the harbor which led to the deadly explosion: the one map is incomplete, other vessels in the vicinty which might have contributed to the confusion and collision are not located, and beyond excerpts from the confusing testimony at the inquisition, there is no minute by minute recapitulation of the movements of the two ships involved...which is what this book, above all else, should contain.(The Imo probably was trying to make up lost time, was speeding, and needed to pass Mont Blanc starboard to starboard, but its signals were not clear.) The stories of the good people of Halifax are moving, to be sure, but the one, incomplete map does not help with locations of streets or landmarks. Finally the responses of others, especially the State of Massachusetts, are remarkable, quite in contrast to the Katrina situation in New Orleans. In the Halifax situation, people did what needed to be done.

Great read. Arrived on time and in great condition. I learned so much about not just this horrific disaster but Halifax as well. Things I did not know and I have been to Halifax on numerous occasions.

I agree with the reviews already written. I too got bogged down with trying to keep track of the names. It is when I got to the end I found the listing of the people. If I had known that earlier it would have reduced my mind confusion. Really enjoyed the way the book was written. You felt their pain with out seeing their blood. I better understand the explosion.

This book could have been well-detailed in 100 pages or so. Instead, the author describes the personal details of over 100 people: where they were standing, what they were wearing, where they ended up after the explosion, their entire personal history, including all their relatives up to cousins, what they did that morning, what they did that night, how they felt, what their injuries were, who they blamed, what they thought caused the explosion, where they lived, what their house was built of, ad infinitum. Described in stunningly soporific detail are each house and building, what street it was on, who was standing nearby and what they eaten that morning and the day before, where they were born, who their parents were and what they did for a living, huge lists of relief supplies down to each blanket and tongue depressor, until your eyes glaze over and you start flipping pages in a mad effort to escape the meaningless, trivial and inconsequential mass of words.

Ironically, the book only includes two very rudimentary maps, neither of which show enough detail for a reader to figure out where the happenings described took place. No street layouts or street names which might have helped one visualize where things were; one tiny, useless map is entirely devoted to the route of a train from Boston to Halifax (as if there was more than one way to get there). You will, however, be glad to hear there is, apropos of nothing, a picture of both an adult and child's speculum alongside a picture of cows grazing outside Boston Children's Hospital circa 1918.

If you're curious about this explosion and its results, do yourself a favor and read the Wikipedia article. This book may be the most definitive account of insanely trivial details you have ever thrown with force at a wall.

My Grandparents, my mother and her two brothers lived through the Halifax Explosion. They were among the few families that survived intact. Ms Mac Donald's book "put flesh" on the stories which we heard as young people. My Grandmother went to her death still with glass in her throatfrom that occasion. Reading the story in this narrative form made it come alive in an interesting way.

Gripping read, but a little bit of a slow start. You have to expect that with disaster books; they need time to set the scene of devastation. This is well written and well-researched, with a number of good pictures. Very informative, especially if you have even a passing association or knowledge of the city of Halifax. Also, a must for anyone with ties to Boston.

This book was a very detailed, thoroughly researched account of the Halifax explosion in 1917. A great read - I felt I knew many of the people and learned a great deal about disaster recovery and the will of people to survive.

I rarely bother to give bad book reviews, but this was terrible. This book reads not like a historical non-fiction, but like a horror movie screen play. Chapters and chapters of very detailed descriptions of the horrible death and dismemberment that happened - I don't need four chapters describing the death of lots of babies. I don't need 5 pages talking about the intricacies of what shards of glass will do to someone's eyeball, and what it probably feels like having your eyeballs removed with only grains of cocaine wiped on them for painkillers, or detailed descriptions of little kid's bashed in heads. This was just ridiculous, I wanted to read about how the recovery was set up, the logistics of how a city coped with such complete obliteration, not something that reads like the creator of Saw wrote it. The timeline and logistics of recovery almost appear as an afterthought to her slasher novel.

It's a given that there was complete devastation, and that horrible, awful things happened to the people that lived through this. I don't discount that we should know about them, and what these people went through, and what awful, gruesome deaths so many of them met. It is truly heartbreaking. But the overload of sickening detail is the focus of this book.