Review by New York Times Review
TO END A PRESIDENCY By Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz. (Basic, $28.) Should a president be impeached? And if so, how do you go about it? Tribe and Matz, both highly respected legal scholars, play out various scenarios, bringing to bear a sense of history and a deep knowledge of constitutional law. when life gives you LULULEMONS By Lauren Weisberger. (Simon & Schuster, $26.99.) From the author of "The Devil Wears Prada" comes a sequel featuring Emily Charlton, ex-assistant to the fashion editor Miranda Priestly. Charlton is now living in the Connecticut suburbs and her career as a Hollywood image consultant has suffered a number of blows, ft's time for an uplifting comeback. the origins of cool in postwar America By Joel Dinerstein. (University of Chicago, $40.) Exploring the intersection of all those midcentury markers of hipness - from film noir to jazz to existential literature - Dinerstein maps out a grand unified theory of "cool," as the concept that came to define the postwar era. not that bad Edited by Roxane Gay. (Harper Perennial, paper, $16.99.) What does it mean to live in a world in which women are, as one essay in this collection puts it, "routinely secondguessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked" simply for speaking their minds? Gay gathers a group of feminist writers who offer answers, ruthless tide By Al Roker. (William Morrow/HarperCollins, $28.99.) The "Today" show co-host and weatherman writes a narrative history of the 1889 Johnstown flood, the deadliest in American history, immersing himself, for a change, in the weather of the past. & Noteworthy "En route to my 20 th college reunion, 1 started reading Elif Batuman's the idiot. Its clever, awkward, insecure protagonist, Selin, is an unforgettable character. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, is a lovelorn Slavicist entering Harvard in 1995, when email was becoming ubiquitous but smartphones were far in the future. The novel is a terrific satire, because it comes from a sympathetic place, (ft even helped relieve my anxiety about the reunion, which turned out to be fun.) One memorable nonfiction book 1 just finished is Lauren Hilgers's patriot number one, a richly reported account of a Chinese dissident who settles in Flushing, Queens, the neighborhood where 1 grew up. ft's the second book I've read about Flushing lately - the other is Atticus Lish's debut novel, preparation for the next life. From radically different narrative perspectives, both books offer compelling portraits of the hopes and disappointments that exist in one of New York's fastest-growing immigrant communities." -SEWELL CHAN, INTERNATIONAL NEWS EDITOR, ON WHAT HE'S READING.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 16, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam on the Little Conemaugh River above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, burst open after a heavy rainfall, flooding the town and killing more than 2,200 people. Celebrated NBC weatherman and author Roker follows his highly praised The Storm of the Century (2015) with an equally riveting account of the Johnstown Flood, which still remains the deadliest natural disaster on American soil. Despite the obvious contribution of bad weather to the tragedy, Roker emphasizes early on that much of the blame for the dam's failure rested with steel-industry titans like Andrew Carnegie, whose nearby soil-eroding logging business and unsafe civil-engineering practices made the rupture almost inevitable. In addition to profiling Carnegie and his wealthy cronies, who built the dam for a mountain-lake resort, Roker describes Red Cross founder Clara Barton's efforts to lead a heroic relief operation as well as the fate of several local citizens caught up in the chaos. Roker turns in another informative, solidly written weather-related page-turner sure to please his fans.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
TV meteorologist Roker (The Storm of the Century) revisits the Johnstown Flood, the 19th-century disaster that destroyed a Pennsylvania town, killed thousands, and raised questions of privilege and liability that still resonate. In the Allegheny Mountains, a poorly engineered dam holding back a lake created for an exclusive summer resort gave way on May 31, 1889, sending 20 million tons of debris-choked water hurtling into the town. Roker, with a weatherman's eye, describes the formation of the unprecedented rainstorms that led to the flooding and the "monster unchained" that was the flood itself. He also tells the stories of locals-including Gertrude Quinn, a child who rode out the catastrophe on a floating mattress, and Victor Heiser, a teenager who helped try to save others from postflooding fires-and connects the incident to larger questions: "Sometimes," he writes, "people do things to change the natural situation in ways that, regardless of intention, create human responsibility." The wealthy members of the resort (among them Andrew Carnegie) didn't mean to hurt anyone, but caused the destruction through negligence, for which they were not held legally accountable. Roker's story is both a good yarn and a morality tale about how the powerful can avoid blame for problems caused by their privilege. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Imagine 14.55 million cubic meters of water from a private human-made lake rushing down a mountainside, laying waste to towns, factories, railroads and homes, and killing 2,209 people after its dam failed from a relentless rainstorm and years of deliberate neglect from corporate greed. While this sounds like the plot of an ecodisaster movie, this "Great Flood" actually occurred in May 1889 in the steel-manufacturing region surrounding Johnstown, PA. NBC's Today show cohost and weatherman Roker (The Storm of the Century) recounts the stories of the townspeople who were victims of Gilded Age excess. He details how the flood-prone region's rivers and ecosystem were compromised by factory run-off, excessive development, and the failure of the dam, which also contained the lake at a private fishing resort frequented by business tycoons such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. VERDICT Science history and American studies students as well as general readers will find Roker's harrowing tale of survival and loss, which draws from archival resources and oral histories captured in David McCullough's definitive history, The Johnstown Flood, reads like a nail-biting thriller.-Donna Marie Smith, Palm Beach Cty. Lib. Syst., FL © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The ebullient weather personality from NBC's Today show returns with a flood account that is both intimate and alert to the wealth and class distinctions highlighted by the 1889 Johnstown Flood.Roker, who wrote about a 1900 hurricane (The Storm of the Century, 2015, etc.), has some sizable footsteps to follow in this oneDavid McCullough's 1968 The Johnstown Floodbut he fills them nicely in this fresh account of the Pennsylvania dam break that destroyed Johnstown and killed more than 2,000 people. Roker is especially adept at focusing on key individualsresidents, politicians, movers and shakers, rescue workersand letting their stories represent the myriads of others. One harrowing tale involves the improbable rescue of a little girl in the swirling torrent that struck the town during a heavy rain when a dam, 14 miles away (and above the town), broke and sent millions of tons of water surging down into Johnstown and some small communities that lay in the torrent's path. The author is also very alert to the class issues that underlay it all. The earthen dam formed a lake for some very wealthy citizens (among them, Andrew Carnegie), who, of course, denied responsibility afterward. Roker notes that only 35 of the 60 members of this wealthy-person's club contributed to the relief fund. The author also goes into detailsometimes too muchabout some of the individuals involved: Carnegie, Clara Barton (whose Red Cross would swell in public awareness afterward), and numerous others. He points out some inconsistencies in American thought, as wellabout how, for instance, we are quick to help people suffering in a natural disaster but not suffering from everyday poverty and disease. He also discusses some of the nasty anti-immigrant feelings that emerged during the cleanup.An exciting, tragic story seasoned with sensitive social analysis and criticism. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
