Next to my grandmother's grave at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery is a large monument dedicated to the employees who were killed during the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing. As a child, I enjoyed looking at the massive stone memorial as I visited the gorgeous cemetery with my grandmother. I also remember her theories about what happened that day. So when I saw American Lightning in the bookstore, I was eager to read the novel.
I really enjoyed the first half of the novel where the story not only centered on the facts of the bombing, but on the labor-versus-capital movements at the time, the rise of Hollywood and the rise of Los Angeles.
The different theories about who committed the bombing at the beginning got me excited, but I felt let down when the author suddenly had Billy Burns latch onto one of many theories without investigating the others-even the most popular and controversial that my grandmother believed.
Still, it is a well-paced book with many interesting facets. I'm not sure how D.W. Griffith and Mary Pickford fit in with the crime of the century, but since I enjoy their movies I also enjoyed everything he included about their rise in the motion picture industry.
Aside from some of Darrow's personal side stories getting a little long, and Burns painted in a very favorable light even when he was knowingly breaking the law, I enjoyed Howard Blum's recreation of a turbelent time in Los Angeles' short history and the crime of the century.
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