David McCullough (1933–2022)

David McCullough, who died last year, was one of America’s best writers on historical subjects. He studied English and art at Yale, went to work for the U.S. Information Agency during the Kennedy administration, and discovered his true calling when he saw a Library of Congress display of photographs of the devastation caused by the 1889 collapse of a reservoir dam above a Pennsylvania coal mining town. The reservoir was a private fishing resort owned by the titans of the steel industry in show more Pittsburgh, 65 miles away. The flood wiped out several closely packed communities and killed more than 2,000 people.
When McCullough could not find a book that told him what he wanted to know about the event, he decided to write the book he wanted to read. He faced a significant problem sifting out the “wild exaggerations and outright nonsense” of newspaper accounts that many people of the time found credible. He sifted through photographs, letters, diaries, and interviews with survivors.
The result reads like the best new journalism, letting people tell their stories with enough factual background to make the events clear and vivid. For many, the flood was experienced first as a sound in the dark: “It began as a deep, steady rumble, they would say; then it grew louder and louder until it became an avalanche of sound, ‘a roar like thunder.’” One man described it memorably as “just like a lot of horses grinding oats.”
McCullough’s conclusions are few but telling. The dam builders were not the experts they pretended to be, and the people of Johnstown mistakenly assumed that “the people who were responsible for their safety were behaving responsibly.” These are lessons we still need to learn. show less

John Adams was in some ways the most easily-known of the first three presidents. He lacked Washington's stoic demeanor. He recorded his own thoughts and impressions of events, unlike Jefferson. It's refreshing to look back on him after so many years of carefully-managed political lives (until the messiness comes spilling out on its own, of course). The problem for Adams' legacy is that Adams comes across as very human, and his faults are there on display for anyone. It's easy to malign him show more when you can use his own careless words against him.

He had faults - he was often accused of vanity, and he could be quick with a sharp word. He was often unsparing in the opinions he voiced in letters. He had famous fallings-out with Franklin and Jefferson. In particular, his break with Jefferson was public and acrimonious. Jefferson wrote in a letter about Adams as a diplomat in the French court, "he hates Franklin, he hates Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English - to whom will he adhere?" Later, accepting Jefferson's resignation as Secretary of State, Adams said, "a good riddance to bad ware." However, in their later years Jefferson and Adams resumed a friendship, even if that was mostly achieved by Jefferson's resolute silence about the things that had caused and would cause acrimony between them.

Adams in a nutshell -

The good: Adams had a unique relationship with Abigail. He talked to her about political matters, and respected her opinions. Evidence exists that he followed her advice and preferences more than once. He was stubborn when he believed in something, and would stand for it no matter the consequences; defending the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trial was an early but not isolated example of this tendency.

The bad: He did have a high opinion of himself; so much so that when he was coming back from Europe after his diplomatic duties there, he was only willing to accept the vice-presidency in Washington's administration, believing that all other offices were below him. (These inferior offices included senator, governor, and Chief Justice.) He had a hard time shutting up when he felt he was being maligned or unfairly portrayed - he wrote a 3-year-long series of weekly columns defending himself against accusations made in a pamphlet by Alexander Hamilton. That Hamilton had been dead for years slowed him down not at all.

McCullough's book captures Adams in all his contradictory vividness. At times I wondered why we seemed to spend so much time on Jefferson, but their lives really were deeply entwined, even down to their July 4 deaths, hours apart from each other. He had a full life (he lived to age 90), he saw more of the world than most of his contemporaries, living in France, the Netherlands, and England, and he enjoyed his life to the utmost. show less

I found "The Path Between the Seas" to be very interesting, well researched and well written. It reads much like a novel and as it progressed I thought it got better.

McCullough organized the book in an easy to understand fashion and it progressed logically. There were some changes in the tone it was written as later chapters used more first person accounts reminiscent of Walter Lord.

Although the book was written in 1977, McCollough gives a fair and even-handed accounting of the show more non-American, non-white workers. He illustrates the differences in the health, diet and living conditions while indicating the canal was really made a reality by mainly West Indian labor. A fact that is very much glossed over in most contemporary accounts.

The backstory of the French attempt and the resulting political backlash was very interesting also.

I am also finding overlapping references to individuals in this book with other histories, Gorgas for example, who was featured in "The Great Influenza" by John Barry is fleshed out more as his work in Panama fighting Yellow Fever and Malaria were the seminal works of his career

This is an excellent history of a monumental project, the likes of which no longer happen. show less

Even in this, his first published book, McCullough exhibits his trademark style of gathering a wealth of information from contemporary sources, subsequent reflections and current reassessments, and then weaving it all together into a gripping narrative. There was a lot of engineering talk in the first third of the book, which I found sluggish going. But McCullough is a master at engaging the reader; once I got past the tricky technical bits about the construction and maintenance (or lack of show more it) of the South Fork dam, he had me totally hooked. You know that cliche about not being able to look away from a train wreck...that's what reading this was like for me. I could wish the photos and maps included in the book had been more sharply reproduced. Even with McCullough's fairly comprehensive descriptions of what was being represented, it was difficult to make out details. Most of them are available on-line, though, where they show to much better effect. The Johnstown Flood is a piece of history that just begs for a treatment like this. If only we could learn from what happens when disaster strikes... show less