Interesting, i have very different preferences. I want to know all about the people involved in a disaster—-even when their backgrounds are “ordinary,” they’re usually different from mine in a way that helps me understand the world better.
And the part about the consequences of the disaster, how they improved airport firefighting or whatever, frankly bores me to tears 🙃
I LOVE digging into disaster stories and particular the nuts / bolts of what went wrong as well as how this changes the future. But as you noted it's hard to fill a book (without it becoming a technical textbook) and a set of chapters focused on different crashes works best.
This might be a case where a different form of media is helpful to tell these stories - personally I get it from youtube though I imagine podcasts / blogs would work well too. I highly recommend MentourPilot on youtube if you want to dig more into aviation disasters.
You also see the same kind of "joint biography" thing in a lot of military history books. I often think of this as the "Flags of our Fathers" school of military history, on the basis that I hated that book when I read it back in grade school because it was too much talking about people's personal lives and not enough about war. (And that ignores the fact that it wasn't even the right people.) This is also part of what drove me away from Hornfisher's Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, which spent (IMO) way too much time talking about random people on the ships and not enough on the battle itself. (I also kept finding annoying technical errors. Nothing horrible, but just enough to be extremely irritating to me personally.) I'm not even saying it's necessarily a bad thing, as I've enjoyed several books that took that framing, the most prominent probably being Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue. (Yes, I know about the problems with that one.) To a first approximation, it may be the ratio of "war through this person's eyes" versus "they were the catcher on the baseball team at Podunk High School". I can accept the latter if it's flavor for a person we're going to get to know well. I am less OK with it if it's done for every third person the author quotes from in a big battle like Samar.
(Definitely with you on the right length for an air disaster analysis being less than a book, though.)
Yeah, I agree about the ratio mattering a lot! I can really enjoy a biography (whether it bills itself as that or not) that's "the war, or the interesting event, through this person's eyes." But if it's a normalish life through this person's eyes, that's another matter.
Compress the "normal life" part down enough, and you have Ernie Pyle's practice of parenthetically mentioning the home address of each soldier he quoted in his war-correspondence columns. It doesn't hold any interest to me (aside from showcasing dramatically different privacy practices!) because it doesn't tell any story at all, but it's short enough that doesn't matter. The ratio still holds.
Interesting, i have very different preferences. I want to know all about the people involved in a disaster—-even when their backgrounds are “ordinary,” they’re usually different from mine in a way that helps me understand the world better.
And the part about the consequences of the disaster, how they improved airport firefighting or whatever, frankly bores me to tears 🙃
Interesting! Thanks for sharing; we seem to have very different preferences in our disaster histories!
I LOVE digging into disaster stories and particular the nuts / bolts of what went wrong as well as how this changes the future. But as you noted it's hard to fill a book (without it becoming a technical textbook) and a set of chapters focused on different crashes works best.
This might be a case where a different form of media is helpful to tell these stories - personally I get it from youtube though I imagine podcasts / blogs would work well too. I highly recommend MentourPilot on youtube if you want to dig more into aviation disasters.
You also see the same kind of "joint biography" thing in a lot of military history books. I often think of this as the "Flags of our Fathers" school of military history, on the basis that I hated that book when I read it back in grade school because it was too much talking about people's personal lives and not enough about war. (And that ignores the fact that it wasn't even the right people.) This is also part of what drove me away from Hornfisher's Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, which spent (IMO) way too much time talking about random people on the ships and not enough on the battle itself. (I also kept finding annoying technical errors. Nothing horrible, but just enough to be extremely irritating to me personally.) I'm not even saying it's necessarily a bad thing, as I've enjoyed several books that took that framing, the most prominent probably being Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue. (Yes, I know about the problems with that one.) To a first approximation, it may be the ratio of "war through this person's eyes" versus "they were the catcher on the baseball team at Podunk High School". I can accept the latter if it's flavor for a person we're going to get to know well. I am less OK with it if it's done for every third person the author quotes from in a big battle like Samar.
(Definitely with you on the right length for an air disaster analysis being less than a book, though.)
Yeah, I agree about the ratio mattering a lot! I can really enjoy a biography (whether it bills itself as that or not) that's "the war, or the interesting event, through this person's eyes." But if it's a normalish life through this person's eyes, that's another matter.
Compress the "normal life" part down enough, and you have Ernie Pyle's practice of parenthetically mentioning the home address of each soldier he quoted in his war-correspondence columns. It doesn't hold any interest to me (aside from showcasing dramatically different privacy practices!) because it doesn't tell any story at all, but it's short enough that doesn't matter. The ratio still holds.