No One Had a Tongue to Speak: The Untold Story of One of History's Deadliest Floods

On August 11, 1979, tens of thousands of Indians were killed in the eastern state of Gujarat when a two-mile damn broke during an unusually fierce monsoon and the surrounding towns were flooded. Like many catastrophes endured by the impoverished, the Macchu Dam disaster has been largely lost to history. Now, through oral histories and significantly varied personal profiles%E2%80%94from the Mayor to a selfless prisoner to a tobacco stall owner%E2%80%94this tragedy finds an excavation in the memories of those who experienced it, and the authors deserve credit for their extensive research and clearly invested compassion (Sandesara is the son of a Machhu flood survivor; Wooten, a former Harvard Kennedy School research fellow, teaches writing at a KIPP school in New Orleans). Unfortunately, as written, the context, outcome, and contributing factors%E2%80%93both manmade and otherwise%E2%80%93become quizzically hard to follow. While the multitude of voices and experiences collected here should reflect the massive scale on which the destruction occurred, the text itself feels confused, jumbled; no unifying narrative culls together a clear shape of the events or their impact, resulting in a history that continues to remain largely untold. (May)