David McCullough (1933–2022)

David McCullough is a writer with the rare ability to propel me through heavy tomes on subjects I know little about. I have never been to Brooklyn, but McCullough engaged me in the drama of the construction of the iconic bridge across the East River. The Great Bridge is his second book. It solidified his reputation as a writer and researcher after his impressive start writing about the Johnstown flood.
McCullough has often said that history is about people, in this case, John Roebling and his son Washington, the designer and chief engineer who got the bridge built. John Roebling had built suspension aqueducts and a railroad suspension bridge across the Niagara, and his family owned a company that produced high-quality wire. He was a hard-headed, meticulous man absolutely committed to his work. Just before construction on the Brooklyn project was about to begin, his toes were crushed at a ferryboat landing. He ignored the advice of his doctors and died from the resulting infection.
His son Washington was a civil engineer with a degree from a rigorous program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He built several bridges for the Union Army and commanded forces at the Battle of Gettysburg. When his father died in 1869, he took over the job of chief engineer and saw the bridge through to completion in 1883. Working in the underwater caissons building the foundations for the bridge’s towers, he suffered from the bends, a disease little understood at the time. He was invalided for the last several years of the project and saw the bridge only through a telescope at his home. He hired a doctor for the project who did groundbreaking work on decompression, but like his father, he ignored good medical advice. His wife, who shared his intelligence and character traits, acted for him when he was ill. She said, and he agreed, that she had more common sense than most engineers. Getting the bridge project through the corrupt, rough-and-tumble politics of Tweed-era New York was a major achievement for a man too ill to attend meetings and twist arms.… (mer)

Incredible the amount of detail author David McCullough is able to muster to flesh out this very compelling story of the struggle of 1776. I learned a lot, and developed a much deeper appreciation for some of the key battles and skirmishes of the American Revolution. From a literary perspective, the story wanes between pages of slightly too much detail to moments of sheer tension and enlightenment. McCullough tells a very human story, focusing on the known facts surrounding key characters, like Nathanael Greene, Charles Lee, Henry Clinton, Charles Cornwallis, William Howe, and George Washington. Highly recommend it for anyone interested in the period.… (mer)

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 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.… (mer)