Word: allenated
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Memories of '38 live on in the horror stories of those who lived through those few hours of hell--and Everett Allen has made an effort to ensure that those stories don't die with their aging heroes. A Wind to Shake the World is Allen's homage to the Big Wind, a meticulously documented diary of the storm's progress as it hacked its swath of destruction across a defenseless New York-New England coastline. It is the story of how swift death burst onto a country that didn't yet know enough about hurricanes even to bother naming...
...Wind to Shake the World is neither great literature nor incisive social commentary. Allen is a journalist, not a novelist, and his style makes this obvious. His prose moves fitfully at best, is downright turgid at worst, and is obviously better suited to the front page of a New England town newspaper than the inside of a classy $10 hard-back. Always the reporter, he is long on detail and short on interpretation. An endless stream of names, places, death tolls and other gruesome details flashes past, making the book itself a hurricane of facts that often leaves the reader...
...this of course opens the book up to charges of being mere trivial adventurism, an historical Deliverance with all white water and no significance. And, to an extent, perhaps the charges are true. Allen, a native of that fine old whaling town, New Bedford, is plainly obsessed with all things nautical and often seems more to mourn the founderings of classic yachts than the deaths of those who went down with them. A Wind to Shake the World is thus more a showcase for the battle of man against nature than a display of how people react to each other...
...cinemascope, and the entertainment becomes all the more horribly satisfying with the realization that the actors in this script didn't get up and walk away when the camera clicked off. If one is prone to tears or cheers, he will succumb more readily with a reading of Allen's book than a hundred screenings of Earthquake...
...storm wave lifted up our cottage and left it sitting right on top of second base in the local softball field.) And even now, many townspeople are perversely proud of the fact that the hurricane wrought more damage in our town than any other on Fire Island. Yet Allen's book is far from a best-seller there--for as one hard-bitten, hard-drinking old-timer told me recently, "He just doesn't say enough about...