Frances Bradburn (Booklist, June 1 & 15, 1995 (Vol. 91, No. 19 & 20))
The great Chicago fire has long been the stuff of folklore and legend. Yet separating fact from fiction in this major disaster has often appeared a secondary priority at best. Murphy sets the record straight through carefully selected documents, personal accounts, photographs, and illustrations. Beginning on that warm Sunday evening, October 8, 1871, in the O'Leary barn, Murphy traces the fire through its three horror-filled days as, fed by lusty prairie winds, cinders from a Saturday night blaze, and structures (even streets and sidewalks) built almost entirely of wood, it consumed block after block of homes, businesses, and bodies, eventually leaving 100,000 people homeless. The book's design complements the author's treatment of the subject. Six double-page spreads of Chicago street maps show the sweep of the flames from the little-known Saturday blaze until rain finally extinguished the fire on Tuesday. Photographs and illustrations of the conflagration and the damage it left behind only add fuel to the author's dramatic text, a riveting narrative that combines the details of the fire itself with personal anecdotes gleaned from newspaper accounts and books written during and immediately after the fire. The Great Fire will automatically draw readers with its fiery cover and illustrations of disaster, but the text will keep them reading. Category: Older Readers. 1995, Scholastic, $16.95. Gr. 5-9.

Gisela Jernigan, Ph.D. (Children's Literature)
The terrible fire of 1871 turned the bustling city of Chicago into one of the country's worst disaster areas, practically overnight. Murphy combines many old, black and white photos, drawings and maps and a detailed text to give us a very thorough picture of the great fire--from it's beginning to it's aftermath--the rebuilding of the city. He successfully interweaves the true survival stories of several real people into his description of the fire's fierce onslaught, which successfully transport readers into the disaster scene. The last chapter dispelling some of the myths and legends that grew up around the disaster is especially interesting. An index and bibliography accompany this engrossing text. 1995, Scholastic, $16.95. Ages 10 up.

CCBC (Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices, 1995)
With spellbinding detail, Murphy follows the spread of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. His exacting research is woven with historical illustrations, maps, photographs and eye-witness accounts of survivors as he reports on the progress of the relentless flames burning through the wooden streets, buildings and walkways of the rain-deprived city with a power both dangerous and seductive to those in their path. In the fire's aftermath, Murphy chronicles the devastation: 300 people dead and 100,000 homeless - wandering streets or setting up shelters in parks and cemeteries. But out of the ashes, Murphy notes, a new city was built - one that pushed the poor from the city's center even as it presented a new and shining face to the world. CCBC categories: HISTORICAL PEOPLE, PLACES AND EVENTS. 1995, Scholastic, 141 pages, $16.95. Ages 11-14.

Kirkus (Kirkus Reviews, 1995)
A veritable cinematic account of the catastrophe that decimated much of Chicago in 1871, forcing more than 100,000 people from their homes. Murphy (Night Terrors, 1993) tells the story through the eyes of several survivors. He focuses on real-life people such as the O'Learys, in whose barn the fire began; James Hildreth, a politician who thought the best way to stop the fire was to blow up houses in its path and create a "fire break,"; Julia Lemo, a widow who found the strength to save her five children and elderly parents; Joseph Chamberlin, a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post; and the courageous Claire Innes, a 12-year-old who survived despite being separated from her family in the fleeing mob. These characters serve as dramatic focal points as the fire sweeps across the city, their stories illuminated by fascinating archival photographs and maps outlining the spread of fire. Murphy assesses the conflicts between rich and poor that both fueled and followed the conflagration. With his conclusion that the tensions between the haves and the have-nots in large cities continued for decades, eventually culminating in the civil unrest of this century, he puts the incident in perspective, giving it stunning immediacy for contemporary readers. Bibliography, Index. 1995, Scholastic, $16.95. Starred Review. © 1995 Kirkus Reviews/VNU eMedia, Inc. All rights reserved.

Elizabeth Bush (The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, May 1995 (Vol. 48, No. 9))
A peg leg wedged into the floorboards of a burning barn, a leather hat writhing in the heat, fireproof buildings gutted, beerhall carousers singing amid the blaze-the 1871 Chicago Fire has all the stuff a young pyrophile's dreams are made of. This account offers not only the luridly enticing details disaster junkies crave, but also a more complex analysis of the causes of the conflagration than is usually offered in children's history books, and an examination of evolving fire apocrypha that introduces young readers to some rudimentary historiography. Murphy opens with a riveting portrait of a tinder town ready to ignite. Wooden buildings, roofed with tar, huddle together on small city lots. Commercial enterprises that run on volatile materials are interspersed throughout residential neighborhoods, and the city is girded with wooden sidewalks waiting to conduct flames through a "highly combustible knot." Add a lengthy spell of dry weather with high winds and the scene is set for disaster. Why one particular barn fire in a season's worth of similar fires blazed out of control has been the subject of debate since the original inquest, and Murphy weighs the evidence as he describes events which, but for their consequences, could play as comedy. Human error undoubtedly contributes: no alarm bell sounds at the Courthouse; visual sightings are inaccurate and wagons are dispatched to the wrong street; one patrolman ignores a supervisor's signal order, while another turns in an inaccurate second alarm. Even nature conspires against containment as an updraft ignites a church spire, hurling embers across the river into another quadrant of the city. But of course it's the human melodrama the audience expects, and as Murphy traces the fire's progress, he also deftly incorporates the testimonies of four eyewitnesses who observe the inferno from radically different vantage points. Joseph Chamberlin and Horace White, both newspapermen, initially savor their encounter with what is obviously a major news item. White describes a scene of orderly evacuation: "There was no panic, no frenzy, no boisterousness, but only the haste which the situation authorized." This is definitely not the experience of Claire Inness and Alexander Frear. Separated from her family by a panicking mob, twelve-year-old Claire is trapped in an alley and receives no aid from people in flight; Frear, attempting to move his in-laws to safety, encounters "a mob of men and women, all screaming and shouting . . . intercepting each other as if deranged." Here Murphy makes an analytical leap at which children's authors often balk-he guides readers into considering circumstances and predispositions that influence the disparate accounts. Do Horace White's public statements reflect his role as civic booster? ("After all," Murphy points out, "a city that had gone wild would not instill much confidence in potential business investors.") Could a shift in the wind simply have bought White's neighborhood time to make an orderly retreat? Chamberlin's testimony concerning two drunken boys and "wretched female[s] . . . rushing out almost naked" should be weighed against his known distaste for the inhabitants of the De Koven Street area. In the concluding chapter, "Myth and Reality," Murphy demonstrates how similar attitudes, among members of White's and Chamberlin's class, would direct public outrage against society's easiest targets-Mrs. O'Leary, portrayed as an old hag who burned the barn for the insurance money, and "a drunken Fire Department," unable to respond to an emergency, creating a legacy of urban myth that lingers today. Carefully credited and captioned period photographs and engravings, collected by the author, mirror the range of experiences presented within the text: calm spectators view the blaze from the river bank; a child is trampled by a fleeing crowd; booster spirit emerges in a "Laborers Wanted" sign perched on the portico of the burnt-out Insurance Exchange. Each chapter concludes with an identical base map, shaded to indicate the current extent of the fire; the tiny area of the fire's origin is pindotted on each map-a chilling visual reminder of the fragile infrastructure, bungled communications, and plain rotten luck that condemned a city to ashes. R*--Highly recommended as a book of special distinction. (c) Copyright 1995, The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1995, Scholastic, 144p; illus. with photographs, $16.95. Grades 4-7.

Horn Book (The Horn Book Guide, 1995)
Vivid firsthand descriptions by persons who lived through the 1871 Chicago fire are woven into a gripping account of this famous disaster. Murphy also examines the origins of the fire, the errors of judgment that delayed effective response, the organizational problems of the city's firefighters, and the post-fire efforts to rebuild the city. Newspaper lithographs and a few historical photographs convey the magnitude of human suffering and confusion. Bib., ind. Category: Nonfiction. 1995, Scholastic, 144pp.. Ages 9 to 12. Rating: 1: Outstanding, noteworthy in style, content, and/or illustration.