On July 6, 1944, as American troops were nearing the end of their involvement in WWII, more than 8,000 Hartford, Connecticut, residents—most of them mothers and children—gathered under the Big Top at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus for a matinee performance. As the Wallendas were beginning their world-famous high-wire routine, a small flame cut a circle behind the bleachers on the southwest side of the tent; those who noticed either ignored it or assumed it was part of the show. By the time ushers got around to dousing it with the four buckets of water kept in reserve for such an emergency, the fire had gained inexorable momentum, climbing toward the roof on a diet of paraffin and white gasoline, a mixture used for waterproofing. In the clamor for the exits, some of them blocked by animal chutes, 167 didn't make it out alive and hundreds more suffered minor to severe burns in what would be the largest civic tragedy in the state's history. But when novelist Stewart O'Nan moved to Hartford and scoured libraries for a full account of the incident, he was astonished to discover that there wasn't one—in part because the war grabbed all the headlines and history books, but also, perhaps, because the city was eager to escape its past. Pieced together from old news clippings, court transcripts, and countless interviews, O'Nan's powerful The Circus Fire is a scrupulously researched and transporting recreation of the event and its aftermath. In vivid, often graphic detail, the author describes the mass hysteria that seized the crowd and the figures who would emerge as heroes, villains, and martyrs. The most fondly remembered are Donald Anderson, a 13-year-old who slit an exit through the canvas with his penknife; May Kovar, a leopard trainer who saved all her animals and hoisted children through the bottlenecked exits; and bandleader Merle Evans, who kept his post and played "The Stars And Stripes Forever" to calming effect. But O'Nan presses beyond individual actions and shows a greater fascination with how the community as a whole reacts to and processes tragedy over time. Descriptions that might seem gratuitously ugly at first—in one passage, some survivors claimed they'll never forget the sound of animals being burned alive, but none were—segue into poignant, humane accounts of a city in mourning. In the end, The Circus Fire is not only an indispensable history book, but a tribute to collective endurance.