Book Review: American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century

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.

Book Review: Empire of the Blue Water

This was the first book on CD I ever listened to and was thoroughly impressed. Stephan Talty's novel was not only about Captain Morgan, but about Port Royal and the British and Spanish unofficial pirate war for the Carribbean.

I really appreciated the fact that while Talty told many side stories to the conflict, they were brief and almost always were related Morgan and his campaigns. This is important in a book on CD as it's harder to skim pages in audio.

I will say however, Talty did treat Morgan with a very favoralble light. While other pirates were depicted as cruel or ruthless, Morgan's actions were almost always justified and any potential atrocities committed by Morgan's men (never Morgan) seemed to be glossed over. John Mayer's reading with a British accent and changes in cadence kept the book humming along.

I really enjoyed the novel as I drove to and from work.