Remembering the Dark Tide

Steven Puleo, who wrote the book on the Great Molasses Flood, which happened 90 years ago today, explains what it's like to write a book about something like that:

At first, the woman in front of me jumped a bit when I popped my head over the seatback and said, "Would you like me to autograph that?"

We had just taken off from Charlotte, on a connector flight from Boston to Hilton Head, and her movement had caught my eye when she pulled a copy of Dark Tide from her bag and settled in to read. When I asked the question, she glanced quickly from me to the book and back to me again, and said, "No – you're not…are you?" But there's no author's photo on the paperback, after all, so she wasn't entirely sure. ...