Review

Abstract

160 Michigan Historical Review Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, while another was the strengthening of federal laws to control water pollution, which were eventually consolidated in the Clean Water Act of l977. The Environmental Protection Agency failed to help in the fight against invasive species because it exempted ship-ballast waters from federal water-pollution-control measures in l973 and maintained that position until 2008. Ballast waters of ocean freighters entering the St. Lawrence Seaway and the muddy slop left in holds after they were flushed with sea water carried invasive species. The Coast Guard is characterized as an ineffective enforcer of environmental regulations for ships. Costconscious commercial shipping interests resisted cleaning up ballast waters. Responsibility for these ineffective measures was shared by scientists, a number of governmental agencies, and politicians who failed to act in time to prevent severe spoliation of the Great Lakes. Controversies and differences of opinion were legion. Finally in 2008, by court order, the Environmental Protection Agency required all ocean freighters entering the Great Lakes to flush their ballast water before entering the St. Lawrence Seaway. This was two years after Canada had implemented a similar rule. Unfortunately, this act was similar to locking the barn door after the horse was stolen, because zebra and quagga mussels had been rapidly spreading in the lakes for two decades. Alexander devotes much of Pandora’s Locks to the damage they have done in the Great Lakes and to their spread to the West Coast. This elaborately researched and engagingly written work deserves the serious attention of a wide readership, especially with the current threat of a new invasion by Asian carp, which is capable of making massive negative changes in the Great Lakes, the largest single source of fresh water in the world. Margaret Beattie Bogue Emerita Professor of History and Liberal Studies University of Wisconsin-Madison Arnie Bernstein. Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Pp. 200. Illustrations. Notes. Selective bibliography. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $18.95. Andrew Kehoe struggled as a youth and young man in Bath Township, Michigan, losing both loved ones and job prospects. Despite enduring various conflicts and traumas, Kehoe managed to Book Reviews 161 obtain a measure of stability and respectability. He married; he dressed impeccably, even when he worked on his farm; he joined civic organizations, including the school board; and he developed a liking for the card game euchre. Although they bristled at his quick temper and wondered about the explosions on his farm, Kehoe’s neighbors knew him as a well-mannered man who kept to himself. That Kehoe is remembered at all is due to the fact that he engineered the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in American history and the most lethal terrorist attack in the country until the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. In Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing, Arnie Bernstein offers an exhaustive account of the events surrounding Kehoe’s claim to immortality: the destruction of the Bath Consolidated School. On May 18, 1927, Kehoe detonated a massive cache of explosives secreted in the school, destroying the building and killing and maiming students and teachers. As rescuers gathered at the scene, Kehoe approached in his car and in a move familiar to anyone reading the news from Iraq and Afghanistan detonated a pile of dynamite within his vehicle, killing himself and a school-board rival and sending shrapnel from scrap metal—carefully gathered beforehand—into the living and dead alike. All told, Kehoe killed forty-five people, including his wife. This affecting and thoroughly researched book is at its heart a local history gathered around a single tragic incident. Bernstein is fond of the minor details of small-town life, such as the procurement of a heated carriage for transporting students to and from school in Michigan winters and Kehoe’s mortgage payments. In troubling contrast to these quotidian details are meticulous descriptions of the human suffering Kehoe caused. There is a line where the recounting of the vivid details of the death throes of children ceases to be illustrative of the crimes of a monster and becomes exploitative, if not pornographic...