Bernie Bernstein author of the “Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing” will be at Everybody Reads 2019 E. Michigan Aven in Lansing, Saturday May 21 at 3:00 p.m.
In his book, Bernstein has paid tribute to the children of Bath Michigan who died in the nation’s worst school bombing which took the lives of 35 children and eight adults in 1927. In a straight forward no-nonsense style Bernstein has captured not only the terrible carnage but also the pain and suffering of survivors and the family members of those losing loved ones in this act of what Bernstein calls an “evil genius”.
The author did not attempt to oversensationalize an event that was already one of those most tragic tales in U.S. history and one of the first documented stories of a true mad man at work. He let the news accounts of the day tell the story which stand by themselves.
The book is a tribute to a community that pulled together in heroic fashion to rescue the living and bury the dead. It is also the story of how even in the 1920s an event of tragic proportion would draw gawkers and ghoulish souvenir hunters. It is estimated on a single day more than 85,000 cars rolled into Bath to rubberneck. And what is amazing is the news coverage which was intense for its time dissipated ithin a few days when the Lindbergh Kidnapping occurred. A full account of the book ran in the Lansing City Pulse.
Visit the author’s website by clicking here. And the University of Michigan Press has a tremendous resource center which you can see by clicking here. A book trailer can be seen here.
