pearl35 's review for:

Breaking Blue by Timothy Egan

4.0

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An outstanding recommendation from a colleague on the transformative power of historical research. Eagan begins by reconstructing 1935 Spokane (and you can see his fascination building for the Dust Bowl for his next book)--an agricultural valley worried about hobos, Okies and scarcity, teeming with bootleggers and vice and aided by a police department of head-knocking goons. When a creamery (butter was .40 a pound) robbery ended in the death of a county sheriff, it was an open secret that a Spokane police officer had been involved, but the city closed ranks. In 1989, Tony Bamonte, the next generation in lawmen, and the son of a raucous logger and good-time girl, set out to write a history of his county's sheriffs as his master's thesis in Organizational Leadership, uncapping the bottle of worms and encountering both tantalizing clues and apathetic denials. I am well aware of the bullies and assholes who aspire to leadership in dying mining and lumber towns, so Eagan's account runs absolutely true about the tragically corrosive results of placing loyalty to men on the wrong side of history over loyalty to the law and the service to the community.