Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book on events at BHSC and its history
Comment: The book provides an excellent resource for the history of the Beverly Hills Supper Club and the fire on May 28, 1977.
The author provides useful floor plans that help shows the lack of exits throughout the building. The book includes many photos from the Supper Club along with employees and guests, etc.
The "Other Voices" chapter has many disturbing stories (especially Bruce Rath) from those who somehow survived the fire or from police, firemen, etc.
After reading this book I am more aware of fire exits whenever I am in a crowded building.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Horrifying Event Well Told
Comment: As I made my way through the pages of Inside The Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire, I often questioned why exactly I was reading such of a sad, macabre occurrence. I think it was less about my being drawn voyeuristically to an account of a disturbing calamity and more about getting to the facts regarding an event I, born in 1978 literally a few miles from the site of the fire, had heard so much about through my entire life.
Ron Elliott's Inside The Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire is the sort of read that leaves you shaken up long after you finish it. I've never been through an account of any tragedy that got to me in quite this way, including some articles and books on September 11th. The comprehensive reporting found in this book, its multitude of second-by-second first-hand stories, the maps, diagrams and photographs it includes are all gripping testimony to a night that still defines tragedy for a great many people. Recently for instance, Cincinnati Magazine devoted much of an entire issue to its cover story on the thirtieth anniversary of the fire, and the issue was among the best selling in the publication's five-decade existence. But while that article did well to inform in the short space it had, Elliott's book is the source to consult for the facts concerning the club and its abrupt ending. For anyone who wants to know about Beverly Hills, I'd recommend it, but also warn that it takes a toll on a reader. Or at least it did on me.
As told in Mr. Elliott's book, the Beverly Hills Supper Club, which once graced a Kentucky hilltop with a commanding view of the Cincinnati skyline, was a massive, fabled locale, billed as the "showplace of the nation," the greatest nightclub between Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Its fifty year history reads like a who's who of mid-twentieth-century entertainment, as one superstar after another took to its stages in front of packed houses. It was said you weren't anyone in show business until you'd played the Beverly Hills. On Mother's Day weekend, 1977, the club was filled beyond safe capacity by more than 3200 patrons and employees, when an electrical fire long smoldering behind thin paneling raced down small hallway, creating a flash fire and a massive cloud of toxic smoke, trapping guests in the densely packed labyrinth of hallways and dining areas within the sprawling club. Most perilously overcrowded that night was the club's Cabaret Room, where singer John Davidson was set to perform later in the evening. The diagram which shows the location of each victim within that room, men and women found stacked atop one another floor to ceiling, testament to their doomed surge toward a single tiny exit, cannot but fill a reader with horror: an emotion that recurs again and again throughout the course of this book's re-telling of the fire.
You can't live in the part of the country where I do and not know about this disaster, or fail to know someone with a personal connection to the events of that horrific night thirty years ago when 165 people lost their lives in one of the most terrible fires in American history. My grandparents went several times a year to Beverly Hills; my two aunts had been there any number of times; my father once applied for a job there in the summer between high school and college, 1974, before getting work in New York City which he accepted instead. My next-door neighbor in childhood was at the club three weeks before the end, and knew six of the victims on, as he has put it "a first-name basis." I once attended a graduation rehearsal in the Fort Thomas Amory, which was a makeshift morgue in the days after tragedy struck. Maybe that's why I read this book. I don't know. What is amazing to me is how two generations later the club and its destruction still casts the shadow it does over an entire region. Even now the prime hilltop real estate on which the supper club sat is vacant, overgrown with weeds and scrubwood, as though it would be taboo to ever again utilize that ground.
If anything good came from the 165 deaths in May 1977, it is that today stricter laws exist nationwide, and whatsmore are enforced, regarding maximum capacity within public places, and the placement of sprinkler systems. Let's hope these actions have saved lives over the decades, as they surely could have on May 28, 1977, in Southgate, Kentucky.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Reminder
Comment: This is a book that covers an event I remeber as though it happened yesterday. I was at the Beverly Hills two weeks before the fire as a prom guest in the garden room. Mr Elliott did an excellent job of recounting the events of that May.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Interesting...but
Comment: As a disaster book fan, I was anxious to read a first person account of this deadly fire which, unlike most modern fires, killed a large number of people. The portion of the book devoted to the fire is alright, but spotty since it is, essentially, one man's recollections. I would have appreciated an overview. This did come later in the book during the inquiries but, by then, it had lost its dramatic impact. I also got a little tired of the narrator who, although happily married, seems to consider himself something of a babe magnet. Really, who cares?
Customer Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Study of the Details Behind this Disaster
Comment: The author of this book gives a precise and complete in-depth picture of the rise and fall of the Beverly Hills Country Club from its beginnings and growth, to its horrific end. As a long time employee of the club, Ron Elliot tells the story from an insiders first person point of view. You feel that you've been there since the Club's inception, getting to know the owners and the employees on a first name basis. You watch as the building is remodeled and expanded on multiple occassions, but without regard to fire codes for reasons unknown. This is an excellent read for fire fighting professionals as well, giving multiple examples of crowd response to an emergency and reinforcing the need for adherence to fire codes in construction, as well as on-going safety inspections. Everyone would do well to read this as a reminder to be aware of where the exits are when going out for an evening's entertainment. An excellent book. I highly recommend it.
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