Circus Fire by Stewart O'Nan

I read this book last night. I thought it was well-written, in terms of style, and it seemed to be very well-researched (although it's obvious the publisher conceived of the audience as non-academic: I would have loved some footnotes). I thought O'Nan did an excellent job capturing the human side of the tragedy, and also giving a fairly comprehensive picture of what happened and how it happened from before the fire (including a preliminary section on a Cleveland menagerie tent fire in 1942) until 1999. I had no idea that there had been a circus tent fire in Hartford in 1944, and now I feel like I have a very good sense of what generally happened. I cannot recommend this book quite as enthusiastically as I have his other works, however, because it's a very tough read emotionally. There's a bit of graphic detail about how people died (and how even those who didn't die in the fire suffered physically), there's at least one photograph of a dead body (it's not tasteless, and was published in newspapers as part of an attempt to identify the girl, known as Little Miss 1565, but still surprised me when I turned the page and found it), and there's a lot of human suffering in this book. I personally think that the stories of the courageous and not-so-courageous men and women who experienced the fire more than compensates for the disturbing, violent, and sad passages, but I wanted to be upfront about the fact that this book could be one of the most difficult I've read this year, emotionally, and let people decide for themselves whether they want to spend their time reading that kind of book, or sticking to the fiction (which has the advantage, even in cases of suffering as appalling as those in this book, of not being true if you're the type of person whom graphic or very sad stories upsets).