“Hemingway’s Hurricane” on Book TV

C-SPAN2’s Book TV will feature 45 minutes this evening (Saturday) on Hemingway’s Hurricane: The Great Florida Keys Storm of 1935. Author Phil Scott chronicles the storm that hit the keys with 200 mph winds and killed more than 400 people. Hemingway weathered the storm in Key West and later concluded that more could have been done to prevent the deaths. His writing about that, some believe, led to his appearance on the FBI watch list. Scott’s Book TV appearance begins at 9 p.m. EST.

According to an AP review of the book on Canada.com:

Phil Scott does a favour with his new book, Hemingway’s Hurricane: The Great Florida Keys Storm of 1935, reminding that deadly storms aren’t a new event but present a real human tragedy when they occur.

By the time the storm ended, more than 400 people were dead, many of them First World War veterans employed in government work during the Great Depression.

The book begins with a look at Ernest Hemingway’s life in Key West and comes back to him, recording that he sailed up to the Keys after the storm to view the damage and wrote an essay decrying the way the victims were treated.

But, despite its title, it’s not a book about Hemingway.

It’s a book about a tempest that claimed hundreds of lives; about how officials’ overconfidence and delays in making a decision prevented a train from arriving in time to save the veterans; and about how they battled the storm, how they died or were hurt, and how some survived.

Scott goes to many contemporary sources to relate individual stories that can be frightening to read, but which are also engrossing.

* Recently on World Hum: Hemingway Was a Regular on Chalk’s Ocean Airways

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