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We may be witnessing the revival of a venerable literary genre these days --- the book whose central figure is not a human being, but a storm. Call them Big Blow Books. The most successful recent example, of course, is Sebastian Junger's bestseller THE PERFECT STORM.
Now comes journalist Willie Drye chronicling a killer hurricane that struck the Florida Keys on Labor Day in 1935, leveling whole villages and killing more than 400 people, most of them impoverished workers imported from elsewhere to work on a federal bridge-building project. Rather than concentrating, as Junger did, on one small group of men aboard a single vessel, Drye roams up and down the 160-mile expanse of islets, bays, straits, and narrows between Miami and Key West. His cast of characters is large, his perspective wide --- almost too wide, in fact, for the success of his purpose.
Those federal workers at center stage in Drye's book form a kind of doomed chorus of poor, hard-drinking, psychologically damaged World War I veterans, many of them veterans also of the failed 1932 bonus march on Washington --- the march broken up by federal troops under the command of Douglas MacArthur. They are bitter men, scarred by war, poorly housed and fed, former war heroes now regarded mainly as troublesome nuisances by their government. It is an interesting idea, but Drye has handled it rather clumsily. His book is full of padding about the Depression and the national political implications of what happened on that holiday weekend. Interesting background to be sure, but far too detailed and not especially well written. The reader becomes impatient for the "storm of the century" to arrive and do its work.
There are heroes and villains aplenty. An emergency evacuation plan existed for getting those workers off the totally exposed Keys in the event of a hurricane, but its implementation fell victim to misunderstandings, misinterpretations, faulty communications, human personality quirks, and accidents of nature. The evacuation train was blown off the tracks before it could get anybody out. The US Weather Bureau, whose resources in those days were primitive, issued warnings, but they were either ignored or misinterpreted. Some of them, too, were simply inaccurate.
If there is a hero in this debacle it is one Ed Sheeran, an official with the Florida Emergency Relief Administration and a veteran of several previous hurricanes in the Keys dating back to 1906. He tried manfully to make colleagues and superiors aware of what was happening and to move them to action. There are several villains also, notably two of Sheeran's coworkers named Ray Sheldon and Fred Ghent who simply failed to do their plain duty, at least in author Drye's view.
An observer of the debacle from the relatively safe haven of his Key West home was Ernest Hemingway, and Drye keeps the reader informed of the great author's every move as the storm hits. An interesting sidelight, but not really essential to Drye's tale.
The final section of Drye's book is taken up with a pedestrian account of the inevitable post-storm political blame game played out among Republicans who wanted to crucify FDR in that Presidential election year and Democrats who wanted to shield him at all costs. Other players include the press, the weather bureau, and various other stakeholders. In view of the huge landslide electoral victory rolled up by FDR a little over a year after the hurricane, the publisher's claim that the storm nearly cost him the election seems preposterous. Not even Drye goes that far.
Among the several investigations of what went wrong, Drye is devastating in his account of the quickie probe (completed in 48 hours) designed to exonerate the government and dismiss the whole affair as an "act of God." His investigative hero is one David Kennamer of the Veterans Administration who took his time, did a thorough job and distributed blame with an even hand.
Drye's writing style is variable. Mainly he works in a series of quick snapshots, moving abruptly from place to place along the Keys and observing his large cast of human characters almost from minute to minute. He can be annoyingly repetitive, and while there are deft phrases scattered throughout, the cliche count is also high (lots of things are "ill-fated"). The advance copy provided for review of this book contained no map of the Keys; one assumes that there will be one in the finished book --- it is absolutely essential to understanding the course of events. Another serious omission is the book's total lack of source notes. Drye's text is full of direct quotations spoken under great stress 67 years ago. Where did he get them? His publisher speaks vaguely of five years of research, but no specifics are provided --- at least not in the review copy.
This is a good book about a catastrophe that had many ramifications, but it could have been a good deal better if more attention had been given to organization, editing, and the placing of emphasis where it belonged --- on the storm itself.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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