Dark Tide
The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919
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Dark Tide
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Narrated by:
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Grover Gardner
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By:
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Stephen Puleo
About this listen
Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters were playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like, "a roaring surf," one of them said later. Like, "a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence," said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window - "Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!" A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour. It demolished wooden homes, even the brick fire station. The number of dead wasn't known for days. It would be years before a landmark court battle determined who was responsible for the disaster.
©2003, 2004 Stephen Puleo (P)2013 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
Editor reviews
One of AudioFile magazine's Best Voices of the Century and Publishers Weekly's Audiobook Narrator of the Year for 2005, Grover Gardner is the recipient of dozens of awards, and listeners will easily understand why. Gardner's diction is reminiscent of classic American radio and provides an evocative feeling to this non-fiction exploration of the molasses flood that overwhelmed Boston on January 15, 1919. The rough edge of Gardner's voice adds texture to its velvety sound as he describes the disaster and its context, easily weaving together the various elements involved, from Prohibition to the anarchist movement to immigration. Listeners will find themselves absorbed by this little-known catastrophe.
What you are actually buying is a book that describes a turbulent time in history which features war, civil unrest, racism, terrorism and the race to manufacture arms (for which the molasses was required).
The book is written in the style of a story but it didn’t work for me because there are so many characters introduced during the first three and a half hours, and I found it so tedious, that by the time the disaster happened, I could not remember them. It would have been better written as an examination of the evidence, in my opinion.
My advice is that if you are only interested in the molasses disaster, you should go straight to part 9 and accept that there is only about an hour of listening to be had.
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