Safety Tips for Living Alone (Kindle Single) (Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading Book 133) Books Details
File Size: 3080 KB
Print Length: 27 pages
Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Publisher: Electric Literature (December 10, 2014)
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Language: English
Print Length: 27 pages
Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Publisher: Electric Literature (December 10, 2014)
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Language: English
ASIN: B00QD5CQR6
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, December 2014. On the one hand,
this short story is a thriller-ish recounting of an historical event:
the cold-war era catastrophe at Texas Tower Number 4, which became one
of the Air Force’s most lethal peacetime disasters. Don’t know much
about it? Fiction writer Jim Shepard has clearly done his research, and
unfolds the tale with an adventure writer’s precision and drama; fearing
a trans-Atlantic attack by our enemies, the government constructed five
platforms meant to detect incoming bombers. (While the platforms lived
from Maine to Atlantic City, they were called Texas Towers because they
looked like oil rigs) It was a bold idea, “one of the Air Force’s most
unlikely achievements” until something went wrong. So far, so
historical; you could just Google the event to learn that. But what
Shepard adds to the story is the emotional and social context of the
period and the event; by introducing, early on, four wives of the men in
the Tower, you know you’re in for something more than a war story.
These women, who got their news cryptically and inconsistently from
their husbands, become the heart and soul of “Safety Tips for Living
Alone.” Like the families left behind in The Perfect Storm, the peek
into the personal lives of these couples indicate that we’re onto a
completely different kind of chronicle: Shepard’s world is one in which
silences say more than words, and blind faith can’t help but lead to
disaster. Get online Safety Tips for Living Alone (Kindle Single) (Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading Book 133) today.
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