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A review by librarianonparade
American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood & the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum
4.0
In the early morning of October 1 1910 the offices of the Los Angeles Times were destroyed in a massive explosion, and twenty-one people were killed. The attack came in the middle of a bitter conflict between labour and capital, with running battles between strikers and scabs, rancorous editorials in the press, whole cities taking sides, and numerous similar explosions in Idaho, Illinois and Indiana among others.
This book follows three key personalities: William J. Burns, the famous detective and later first head of the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI, who was hired by the City of Los Angeles to find the guilty parties; Clarence Darrow, the crusading lawyer hired to defend the McNamara brothers; and D.W. Griffiths, the innovative director of Birth of a Nation, who launched the careers of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish among others.
It's a fascinating story, particularly the chapters dealing with the investigation into the explosion, and the three characters at the heart of the story are all lively and larger-than-life. The D.W. Griffiths connection is a bit tenuous - he had very little to do with the investigation at all - but his story is just as interesting. I could hardly put this book down, and it's particularly topical now, when so many parallels with the first decade of the previous century are apparent: conflict between labour and capital, terrorist outrages, the role of the movies and entertainment in shaping political beliefs, debates over the means justifying the ends in criminal investigations. Things don't change much in a 100 years, it seems.
This book follows three key personalities: William J. Burns, the famous detective and later first head of the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI, who was hired by the City of Los Angeles to find the guilty parties; Clarence Darrow, the crusading lawyer hired to defend the McNamara brothers; and D.W. Griffiths, the innovative director of Birth of a Nation, who launched the careers of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish among others.
It's a fascinating story, particularly the chapters dealing with the investigation into the explosion, and the three characters at the heart of the story are all lively and larger-than-life. The D.W. Griffiths connection is a bit tenuous - he had very little to do with the investigation at all - but his story is just as interesting. I could hardly put this book down, and it's particularly topical now, when so many parallels with the first decade of the previous century are apparent: conflict between labour and capital, terrorist outrages, the role of the movies and entertainment in shaping political beliefs, debates over the means justifying the ends in criminal investigations. Things don't change much in a 100 years, it seems.