Status Updates From The Last Days of St. Pierre...

Definitely not as good as the Scarth book, but I’m glad I read it because it did have a lot of additional stuff. The Scarth book was super focused. This book offered more granularity about personalities, and the “adventures“ of some outsiders who came after May 8 to look at the devastation and the volcano. I was in a better position to appreciate that because I read the other book first.

Weird little fictionalized scene with the meeting of the scientific commission: there have been other little creative embellishment bits like this, but this one sticks out more because of all the invented dialogue.

One thing that I like about this book is that it has given some actual real estate to the volcano that went off in St. Vincent a day before Mount Pelee really blew its top. A full chapter, “La Soufriere.”

“So what’s going to happen next, Professor?” “I wish I knew.” “But don’t you scientists know everything?“ “Hardly, Dr. Guérin. If we did, we wouldn’t be scientists. We’d be encyclopedias.“

“The only thing obviously colonial about Martinique was that its governor was appointed rather than elected…”. And that all the natives were killed off. “…Martinique and the other French West Indian islands were better off in every way…[including] the participation of natives in the government of the mother country.“ The ones that got killed off save for the scant few at the north end of the island?

Scarth (and Ozymandias, the reviewer who recommended his book) may have ruined me for Zebrowski. Still, I shall continue.

I am now officially afraid of volcanos.