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An Elegantly Crafted Love Story Set in Post-Civil War America In Sunlight, In a Beautiful Garden tells of a bittersweet romance set against the backdrop of the greatest industrial disaster in American history: the construction and subsequent collapse in 1889 of the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, dam. It was a tragedy that cost 2,200 lives, implicated some of the most illustrious financiers of the day - Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon - whose carelessness contributed to the disaster, and irreparably changed the lives of those who survived it. This is the story of these men and of the families who lived in the shadow of the dam: the daughter of the lawyer who filed the charter for an exclusive club on the shore of the artificially created lake; the Quaker steel mill owner who tried to stop the dam's construction; a librarian, escaping to a bustling mountain city from a loveless life in Boston; a young man determined to expose and undermine the greed and carelessness that shaped the last years of the nineteenth century. A cautionary tale for our new century, In Sunlight, In a Beautiful Garden is a story of youthful promise and devastating loss, of power and its misuse, and of greed and the philanthropy that is too often a guilty by-product.… (more)
User reviews
Kathleen Cambor does a good job with her characters. She also creates a believable setting. As the title suggests, the mountain-top gentlemen's club which failed to maintain its dam, was a beautiful place where the beautiful people at the end of the 19th century gathered. And into that beauty came disaster. Not to the club & its members, but to the residents of the town below.
Besides telling a good story, In Sunlight, in a beautiful Garden gives a very down-to-earth example of the regard which the rich & powerful regarded the ordinary people of that time. (And other times, as well)
The characters are all dealing with their relationship to the greater society, and the flood too
This wasn't quite as dramatic as I was expecting. But it's worth reading.
The characters are all dealing with their relationship to the greater society, and the flood too
This wasn't quite as dramatic as I was expecting. But it's worth reading.
It is a love story of sorts, set in the time leading to the Johnstown flood of 1889. A
I did not like the epilogue.