Book Review: Floodpath

Floodpath: The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of 20th-Century America and the Making of Modern Los Angeles
Jon Wilkman
History, engineering

This is a perfectly decent book about the failure of the St. Francis Dam in 1928. The writing is decent. There's a lot of detailed research. The description of the flood is evocative. Wilkman does some modest analysis, reaches a few tentative conclusions, and ties the events of 1928 lightly into a larger context. There's nothing that falls short of the title, and nothing that goes beyond it. In short, if you think the subject matter sounds interesting ...

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For a closely related book, see Water to the Angels, although Floodpath is more measured in its assessments. The grandfather of all dam-failure disaster books is, of course, David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood. For a book full of local interest, Elizabeth Sharpe's In the Shadow of the Dam describes the Mill River flood of 1874 in Northampton, MA.