Killer 'Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928
by Robert Mykle
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert MykleEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-08-25
ISBN: 158979298X
Number of pages: 268
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing
Book Reviews of Killer 'Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928
Book Review: For the Love of Muck
Summary: 4 Stars
A natural disaster looms on the horizon but government and financial leaders play down the danger because of the possible loss of tourist and investor dollars. The public is than caught completely off-guard when the disaster strikes and the carnage is far worse than anyone could have predicted. If this scenario sounds familiar it's because Hollywood has served up this basic formula for years in films ranging from "Earthquake" to "Jaws." Robert Mykle has given us the very same plot in this book but in this case the story is horribly real.
In the early twentieth century there was a land boom in Florida as the wealthy discovered the warm climate and farmers discovered the extremely rich soil around the Everglades. World War I caused a great demand for vegetables and the rich "muck" of the Everglades could produce two or three excellent crops a year with green beans being the prime crop. With vegetable prices at an all time high the farmers of the area spent a great deal of time and effort trying to push Lake Okeechobee back in order to uncover more crop land. It never seemed to occur to them that one day the lake just might push back.
In 1928 when the category four "Killer 'Cane" hit the area the lake did indeed push back and by the time the storm had passed most of South Florida was under two to three feet of water. Of course two or three feet of water isn't going to kill many people but the eighteen foot storm surge created on the lake was more than capable of taking many thousands of lives. As recently as 2001 human bones were still being plowed up in fields where they were buried by the storm in the muck they had so lusted after. Unlike the disaster movie villains Hollywood has produced however the Florida authorities didn't learn their lesson and managed to undercount the dead by at least a thousand people so as not to scare away the tourists.
Robert Mykle has written a very credible account of this tragic event and his method is one that makes the hurricane seem very real. Much of the book is taken in introducing the reader to the people and places that are about to be blasted by this killer storm. The author goes back many years in tracing some of these families and their migration to the Everglades and he does manage to make the reader feel as if they actually know some of these people. His method succeeds in making all of the death, suffering and destruction hit home with the reader but he takes his method to extremes sometimes and goes back a bit too far, making the story drag a just a tad at times. He also makes several historical statements that are simply not true and although they don't deal directly with the storm these kinds of errors certainly hurt the author's credibility. Just to quickly mention three of these errors; Andrew Jackson was not born west of the Appalachian Mountains, General Meade was never removed as commander of the Army of the Potomac by Abe Lincoln and there were no Axis Powers in World War I. It's picky I know but someone writing a history book just shouldn't make these kinds of errors.
Overall though this was a very good and readable book. The author does an excellent job of relating pertinent meteorological data such a way that it made it clear and understandable and in a book like this one that is a very important task. His verbal descriptions of the devastation are also very good and his blow by blow description of the storm as it pounded its victims was extraordinarily good. Mykle in fact had done such a good job of introducing some families that I found myself hanging on every word to see who survived and who didn't.
In short, there are some flat spots in this book but it contains a story that needs to be told and told with heart. Robert Mykle has accomplished this task admirably.
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