Books: Flood's Survivor

AN AMERICAN DOCTOR'S ODYSSEY—Vic-tor Heiser—Norton ($3.50).

On the afternoon of May 31, 1889, a 16-year-old boy named Victor Heiser left his family home in Johnstown, Pa. to move two horses from the stable. He never returned. As he released the horses he heard a "dreadful roar . . . punctuated with a succession of tremendous crashes." He climbed to the top of the building. He saw his parents waving to him from a window, just before a wall of water and de-bris—"a dark mass in which seethed houses, freight cars, trees and animals"— struck...

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