I finally read a book about the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, I can cross that off my bucket list!

I was thrilled to find a whole book about this disaster and even more excited when I started reading and found it was a lucid, informative account. The author takes pains to set the scene, including the global socioeconomic factors that led to the molasses tanks' shoddy construction and eventual collapse. The one issue I had with this book was that sometimes this penchant for scene setting strayed a bit too far from the narrative at hand. When the author is describing Italian anarchists for pages and pages one gets the sense he’s trying to fill space more than provide crucial information. This is a minor point however and overall this was a great historical account, I especially loved the tail end of the epilogue where the author recounts how the various people in the book spent the rest of their lives after the molasses flood. I love a good post credits, “where are they now?” paragraph to end a history book.