Word: wind
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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...
...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 in times of crisis. The heroism, of which there is plenty, seems yanked from a John Wayne movie script; we see lots of heroes, but precious...
...seriously, few people have read it. When I was quite a bit younger, "Thirty-eight" was a constant source of fascination for almost everyone in town. If you were among the younger set, your personal stock rose with your ability to tell hair-raising stories about what the Big Wind had done to your family's house. (I always came off the winner in contests like these, after repeating the probably apocryphal tale of how the storm wave lifted up our cottage and left it sitting right on top of second base in the local softball field.) And even...
...million viewers on its third night, making that episode the third most popular TV presentation in history. With almost seven out of every ten sets in use tuned to the drama, the only shows that have had a bigger audience were NBC's screenings of Gone With the Wind...