Hee! I think I might've mentioned to you that I sometimes go through a phase where I want to read a ton of 'well-written historical-disaster books'. I have sometimes categorized these kinds of books as "If Only They Had Known"--the book shows the causes of a disaster, slowly building up, laying down flagstone after flagstone through incompetence, ignorance, accident, malice...all the while the people involved don't quite see the disaster coming, or if they do they can't prevent it.
Like, the Hartford Circus Fire or the Cocoanut Grove fire, the Children's Blizzard of 1888, the Galveston hurricane, etc. etc. etc. The Great Molasses Flood included!
And back before ebooks, I would sometimes have a couple-few of these exact kind of books in my carryon luggage. If I had been searched--or if the plane had crashed and someone found my luggage, more to the point--there woulda been a LOT of eyebrows raised.
I don't know, sometimes I just get in a mood! Not sure what it's about. Possibly something about the ability of a good historian to look back and draw together strands of things that at the time were invisible, showing the causality and gradual direction in something that at the time seemed sudden and incomprehensible and irrational.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2017-01-07 05:42 pm (UTC)Hee! I think I might've mentioned to you that I sometimes go through a phase where I want to read a ton of 'well-written historical-disaster books'. I have sometimes categorized these kinds of books as "If Only They Had Known"--the book shows the causes of a disaster, slowly building up, laying down flagstone after flagstone through incompetence, ignorance, accident, malice...all the while the people involved don't quite see the disaster coming, or if they do they can't prevent it.
Like, the Hartford Circus Fire or the Cocoanut Grove fire, the Children's Blizzard of 1888, the Galveston hurricane, etc. etc. etc. The Great Molasses Flood included!
And back before ebooks, I would sometimes have a couple-few of these exact kind of books in my carryon luggage. If I had been searched--or if the plane had crashed and someone found my luggage, more to the point--there woulda been a LOT of eyebrows raised.
I don't know, sometimes I just get in a mood! Not sure what it's about. Possibly something about the ability of a good historian to look back and draw together strands of things that at the time were invisible, showing the causality and gradual direction in something that at the time seemed sudden and incomprehensible and irrational.