One of the redeeming qualities of warmer weather is upon us: it's summer reading season here at MM! Time to revisit the list of future reads I've been compiling throughout the year and finally get down to it--let the traditional themes of serious historical pursuit intermingled with random "literary" frivolity commence! The usual M.O. of my summer reading habits is a steady diet of extremes: biographies! Novels! William Shatner fan fiction! Abraham Lincoln! Zombies! We like to mix the dense with the fluffy, the impressively haughty with the embarrassingly low-brow--it's what summer reading's all about!
Anyway, I thought I would share our first entry for your consideration: Thunderstruck by Erik Larson, I just finished it yesterday. Some of you may recall that Larson wrote another book that made the MM radar in a big way earlier this year: The Devil in the White City. Thunderstruck hits all the same notes, telling several stories that eventually intermingle: it's all about the invention of wireless communication (focusing on Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian inventor pictured above with his wireless equipment) and a murder that became the next great public fascination following the Jack the Ripper murders in London. Like Devil it revels in historical detail and breathless storytelling, this time focusing on turn-of-the-century London. Larson, who has written for The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, is a helluva researcher--he seems to be able to reach past the primary resources and pull out the atmosphere and feel of the era.
Thunderstruck is fast-paced and fun (well, fun if you are interested in the finer points of the birth of globalization and a good/true-life murder mystery), and illustrates perfectly the effect wireless had on the world through the B plot: the killer and his lover are tracked and caught by Scotland Yard through the use of ship-to-shore wireless communication as they are fleeing from Brussels to Quebec aboard an ocean liner. The case was instantly famous--it was reported in the press around the world as it was happening, demonstrating the viability and value of wireless, which propelled it out of the realm of mere novelty and into widespread use. Recommended!
My next pick, as per my usual trend, will be a novel: The Kingdom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming. I understand this is a science fiction novel, a genre I've been meaning to revisit, and the review from Publishers Weekly really sealed the deal for me:
"Flaming's debut mixes time travel, historical grit and an alternate history of the American frontier in a romance with a fantastic bent. A contemporary antiques dealer, after coming across an old photo, unspools the story of Peter Force, newly arrived in 1900 New York from Idaho, as he joins a crew of laborers toiling in grim conditions to build the subway system. A chance encounter throws Peter into the path of Cheri-Anne Toledo, a troubled woman who claims to have traveled seven years into the future from the Lost Kingdom of Ohio, a small frontier kingdom over which her father reigned. Cheri-Anne's plight, and his feelings for her, drags them into the orbits of a crusty J.P Morgan and of dueling inventors Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla. As Peter and Cheri-Anne evade the powerful forces invested in Cheri-Anne, the moment when their lives and the contemporary narrator's intersects looms closer and closer, creating palpable suspense. The journey through the seedier side of New York's Gilded Age, with reprisal killings for labor agitators and nights spent in drunken dance halls, is an arresting contrast to classic time-travel themes. This is a real crowd-pleaser."
Time Travel! The year 1900! An alternative history of the American frontier! Edison vs. Tesla! Labor agitators! Oh boy!
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