The Town that Died: A Chronicle of the Halifax Disaster

Dean F. Oliver is the assistant director of the Centre for International
and Security Studies at York University in Toronto.

Michael Bird’s account of the 1917 Halifax Explosion is as captivating
a disaster tale as this country’s writers have ever produced.
Supplemented but not displaced by later historical works—most notably
Ruffman and Howell’s edited collection Ground Zero (1994)—The Town
That Died remains the only must-read account of one of history’s
greatest man-made explosions, a blast that all but destroyed a major
Canadian city and killed or injured more than 11,000 people.

From the opening scene in the wheelhouse of the French freighter Mont
Blanc, one of the two vessels whose collision in Halifax harbor caused
the explosion, through the graphic description of the blast, the damage,
and subsequent relief efforts, to an account of the legal proceedings
that belatedly tried to fix blame for the catastrophe, Bird holds the
reader’s attention with simple, direct prose and the morbid
fascination exuded by the incident itself. Sprinkled liberally
throughout the narrative are numerous personal accounts, like that of
seven-year-old Edith O’Connell, her family’s only survivor, whose
tiny frame was blown up, half-drowned, and nearly incinerated before
unconsciousness offered her a temporary respite.

Clear, concise, and well-written, this book is a genuine Canadian
classic whose pages will be turned speedily with both fascination and
horror by academic and nonacademic alike.