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gavgaddis's review
informative
reflective
slow-paced
2.25
An unfortunate instance where the cover and title are evocative than the book itself.
When reading this I was under the (wrong) impression it was the book before Larson's runaway success Devil in the White City. For all of Thunderstruck's flaws, it's a neat oddity of picking apart all the things that would grow into familiar Larson tropes.
Instead, this is the immediate follow-up to Devil, which begs the question: why this?
Devil in the White City is a wonderful juxtaposition of the buffoons pretending to be titans organizing a feat of engineering while a lowly doctor built a murder-house in plain site. Thunderstruck is if someone wrote a massive book about how Elon Musk accidentally made a profit because a Tesla accidentally helped solve a murder.
It's almost like Larson feels indebted to his research subjects and thus doesn't stoop to interrogating the veracity of claims much, let alone criticize their actions. The narrator of Thunderstruck is aggressively centrist, attempts to be apolitical, and tries to sand the rough edges off historically-significant men who happen to also be giant dicks.
This is a book exactly in the period of history I love reading about and I found myself finishing it only because Bob Balaban reads the audiobook and there's some novelty to listening to something as if it's read by Pinky and the Brain's titular Brain.
There's almost a feeling Larson himself only rehashed the two stories converting gimmick because of Devil. The book drags any time he has to switch from the engaging story of an antisocial tinkerer changing the world to the life and times of Dr. Crippen.
Crippen is no H.H. Holmes. His crime is so pedestrian Larson intentionally constructs the narrative so his crime isn't directly addressed until the final few chapters.
Larson needed to write another book and it needed to be similar to Devil and this is what we got. It even opens with a petulant author's note that, if it'd been written ten years later, probably would've contained a sarcastic utterance of the phrase "trigger warning." Larson steps on the proverbial stage to preemptively apologize for the more gruesome moments when the book delves into true crime macabre detail in the back half.
At least this speed bump means we eventually got Dead Wake.
When reading this I was under the (wrong) impression it was the book before Larson's runaway success Devil in the White City. For all of Thunderstruck's flaws, it's a neat oddity of picking apart all the things that would grow into familiar Larson tropes.
Instead, this is the immediate follow-up to Devil, which begs the question: why this?
Devil in the White City is a wonderful juxtaposition of the buffoons pretending to be titans organizing a feat of engineering while a lowly doctor built a murder-house in plain site. Thunderstruck is if someone wrote a massive book about how Elon Musk accidentally made a profit because a Tesla accidentally helped solve a murder.
It's almost like Larson feels indebted to his research subjects and thus doesn't stoop to interrogating the veracity of claims much, let alone criticize their actions. The narrator of Thunderstruck is aggressively centrist, attempts to be apolitical, and tries to sand the rough edges off historically-significant men who happen to also be giant dicks.
This is a book exactly in the period of history I love reading about and I found myself finishing it only because Bob Balaban reads the audiobook and there's some novelty to listening to something as if it's read by Pinky and the Brain's titular Brain.
There's almost a feeling Larson himself only rehashed the two stories converting gimmick because of Devil. The book drags any time he has to switch from the engaging story of an antisocial tinkerer changing the world to the life and times of Dr. Crippen.
Crippen is no H.H. Holmes. His crime is so pedestrian Larson intentionally constructs the narrative so his crime isn't directly addressed until the final few chapters.
Larson needed to write another book and it needed to be similar to Devil and this is what we got. It even opens with a petulant author's note that, if it'd been written ten years later, probably would've contained a sarcastic utterance of the phrase "trigger warning." Larson steps on the proverbial stage to preemptively apologize for the more gruesome moments when the book delves into true crime macabre detail in the back half.
At least this speed bump means we eventually got Dead Wake.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore
Moderate: Toxic relationship
Minor: Adult/minor relationship
mscalls's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
informative
tense
medium-paced
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Xenophobia, Gore, Murder, Blood, Bullying, Death, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Miscarriage, Toxic relationship, and War
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