FINALLY.....its over!!!!! I usually do not stick with books that I am not enjoying. For some reason, most likely masochism, I decided to suffer through all 480 pages of Erik Larson's follow up to his blockbuster thriller, Devil in the White City (a book that I thoroughly enjoyed and was happy to write a positive book review).
In Thunderstruck Larson once again uses his equation of uniting duel historic events, one focused on scientific discovery and the other a murder mystery. Specifically, the story focuses on Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless communications and Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, accused of murdering his gold digging, volatile wife. The connection....Crippen is discovered and is pursued across the Atlantic by authorities who, for this first time, utilize wireless communications to coordinate his capture and arrest. In fact, this part of the story is a bit interesting. It's really the first 240-300 pages of the novel that you can do without.
Larson spends way too much time in the early part of this novel providing distracting and irrelevant details that take away from the overall story. My theory is that he was over compensating for the fact that neither of the two events covered in Thunderstruck were nearly as interesting as those covered in Devil in the White City. As an enthusiast of technology and telecommunications, I did not mind so much digging into the history of how wireless communications was born. Even so, the level of detail Larson provided regarding this history seemed to cross some line that put story telling second to him showing off his research prowess-YAWN!
I could go on-but I really do not want to waste any more time on this book then I already have. On a brighter note, I just started to read Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. So far, it's fantastic!
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