Inside the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire Review

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(More customer reviews)The author of this book gives a precise and complete in-depth picture of the rise and fall of the Beverly Hills Country Club from its beginnings and growth, to its horrific end. As a long time employee of the club, Ron Elliot tells the story from an insiders first person point of view. You feel that you've been there since the Club's inception, getting to know the owners and the employees on a first name basis. You watch as the building is remodeled and expanded on multiple occassions, but without regard to fire codes for reasons unknown. This is an excellent read for fire fighting professionals as well, giving multiple examples of crowd response to an emergency and reinforcing the need for adherence to fire codes in construction, as well as on-going safety inspections. Everyone would do well to read this as a reminder to be aware of where the exits are when going out for an evening's entertainment. An excellent book. I highly recommend it.

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Twenty years of silence. No one talked about it. No one wanted to. But now, it's time. The public was shocked by ghastly televised images of an uncontrollable inferno and of the endless views of twisted, charred remains of what had been billed as The Showplace of the Nation, now reduced to smoldering rubble with 167 of its guests dead. How could this happen?From its notorious early years of illegal gambling, glamorous night life and organized crime to its reborn reputation as one of the finest entertainment and dining establishments in the country, the Beverly Hills Supper Club was frequented by the biggest stars, governors, politicians, and athletes of its day and never failed to deliver a good time. But, On May 28, 1977 the final curtain fell.Now, you can know what really happened. Follow long-time Beverly Hills dealer, waiter and finally captain, Wayne Dammert, in his personal inside account of this renowned showplace and the horrifying events of one of our nations' worst disasters. Wayne Dammert and other survivors tell the inside story: true eyewitness accounts of the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire.--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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To Sleep with the Angels: The Story of a Fire Review

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(More customer reviews)Many books have been written about real-life tragedies, and in this sense, Cowan and Kuenster's book is no different. However, there is a thin line in these type of books between boring the reader by burying the human aspect of the story with an overload of factual material and becoming nothing more than a non-fiction hankie weeper. Quite a few books have disappointed me in the past by straying to either one side or the other. Not so with this one. It is a solid piece of reporting that does not lose the human dimension of the tragedy. Nor does it obscure the investigation and the facts with too much emphasis on the human dimension.
The fire at Our Lady of the Angels was one of the worst tragedies to strike America, made even more so in that the vast majority of its victims were innocent children. The authors follow the story from the day it occured to the fire itself and the heroic efforts of the fire department to the later delegation of blame and recriminations from what was seen as a bureaucratic conspiracy. In doing so they manage to bring the reader into the story not merely as a spectator but almost as a fellow reporter, sharing not only facts, but also conjectures and whispers plus personal items about the victims, always careful always to straddle the line between objectivity and thje trap of a "crusading" journalism. By letting the story speak for itself, they bring it home all the more forcefully, to where no one who reads it will remain unaffected.
This book should also serve as a warning against the false sense of security that this sort of thing cannot happen again. There are still many schools, public and private, at risk, and this is a book that should be read by every parent with children still in school, and not only during Fire Prevention Week.

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Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder: And Other True Cases (Ann Rule's Crime Files) Review

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(More customer reviews)I haven't met an Ann Rule book I didn't like, but they are always too short! This one I read in two days. This book focus' on women in abusive relationships that lead to murder or almost-murder. I really liked the stories that are older cases. With so many true crime shows on TV, it's hard to find something new and fresh. Since this is a "crime file" you have the option of dipping into the book when you'd like, story by story. Ann also has many resources for women in trouble in this volume including websites to visit. Ann always makes the victims come alive in each of her books, honoring them in a way few can.

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