Oregon Disasters: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival

There is a fascination in reading about disasters, especially ones that are close to home. So when I came across Oregon Disasters: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival at a gift shop, I snatched it up to see what the book had to say about disasters that have occurred in the state where I live. In Oregon Disasters Rachel Dresbeck covers 20 incidents that span the time period from 1903 to 2003 and include a number of different types of disasters: a shipwreck, a sinking, floods, fires, a wind storm, mountain climbing accidents, blizzards, a tsunami, a massive chain-reaction car accident, and an airplane crash. She even covers the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State because "many of the fifty-seven official dead were from Oregon." Like any good story-teller, particularly one telling stories of tragedies, Dresbeck emphasizes the impact of these events on the people involved and on their friends, families, and communities. Though the chapters are short - any one of them could easily be developed into a book of its own - Oregon Disasters is engrossing and well-written. While the chapters can be read in any order, reading them in sequence (from oldest to most recent) gives more of a feel for the flow of history, which is an important element of the book. As important as the people in the stories are to the reader, Dresbeck herself writes that "the stories in this book were chosen for their scale and scope - not necessarily for how many people died, but whether the event had a deep or long-lasting influence, whether it wrought changes to landscapes, lives, practices, or policies." Whether you focus on the individuals whose lives were changed by these disasters or on the influences and aftermaths of these incidents, Oregon Disasters makes for a good read.