On March 3, 1966, a devastating tornado struck the Candlestick Shopping Center in South Jackson, Miss., flattening buildings and killing 14 people. Because her family had just moved away from their home across the road from the shopping center, Hemingway (granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway and author of Walking into the River), who was a child at the time, missed the disaster. All her life she has been obsessed with it, however, and in 2000 she went back to learn about it from childhood friends who were there. In this moving book, she tells the story twice, first in her own words and then in the words of the survivors whom she had interviewed. Weaving nostalgia for the world of her childhood with apocalyptic images of that world "rolled onto a spear, of the sky punctured at its heart," Hemingway skillfully draws the reader into the nightmare, describing the moments preceding the tornado and the instant when everything was turned upside down. Without overwriting, Hemingway describes how a familiar setting is suddenly turned into a morass of shattered concrete, twisted metal, splintered glass, mangled cars and broken bodies and how everyone walks and speaks "with reverence because what is heaving and bending at jagged turns all around them is a burial ground they must undo." Even after Candlestick Shopping Center was rebuilt, the people stayed away because they found they couldn't bear to remember. (July)
