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A review by directorpurry
American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood & the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum
2.0
Actual rating: 2.5 stars
So I will say some of this is colored by my inability to really get into audiobooks. I find I get very distracted and might miss something, so I usually only listen to audibooks of novels I know very well.
That said. The writing was interesting. I didn't really know very much about the bombings before coming in, so it was cool to learn some completely new history.
But what really threw me off was D. W. freaking Griffith.
I have a degree in film. I know he did a lot of amazing things for the medium. He was an innovator and both stylistically and technically very skilled.
He's still a PoS. I hate him. He was pretty racist. He was painfully into teenage girls.
And this book glorified a lot of what he did. There was a ton of information about what good he did for the film medium, but also some very uncomfortable tongue in cheek comments, like, "Oh that rascal, he sure liked that girl who looked like a 14 year old! It's okay, though, because she was 16!" Can you not?? There was little to no criticism of Griffith until the very end of the epilogue and by that point, I found it was too little too late.
Really, he wasn't even particularly relevant to the story, to be perfectly honest, so I would have been happy to see him gone.
In general, Blum offered very little of his own criticism, which didn't really work in this particular instance. I felt like there needed to be much more or practically none to make it really work.
I didn't come into this book knowing about the plot, so I would say I learned quite a bit from it. It's an easy read and not very long, so if you're looking for a quick bit of true crime that's not about a serial killer or a murder (specifically), this might be one to try out!
So I will say some of this is colored by my inability to really get into audiobooks. I find I get very distracted and might miss something, so I usually only listen to audibooks of novels I know very well.
That said. The writing was interesting. I didn't really know very much about the bombings before coming in, so it was cool to learn some completely new history.
But what really threw me off was D. W. freaking Griffith.
I have a degree in film. I know he did a lot of amazing things for the medium. He was an innovator and both stylistically and technically very skilled.
He's still a PoS. I hate him. He was pretty racist. He was painfully into teenage girls.
And this book glorified a lot of what he did. There was a ton of information about what good he did for the film medium, but also some very uncomfortable tongue in cheek comments, like, "Oh that rascal, he sure liked that girl who looked like a 14 year old! It's okay, though, because she was 16!" Can you not?? There was little to no criticism of Griffith until the very end of the epilogue and by that point, I found it was too little too late.
Really, he wasn't even particularly relevant to the story, to be perfectly honest, so I would have been happy to see him gone.
In general, Blum offered very little of his own criticism, which didn't really work in this particular instance. I felt like there needed to be much more or practically none to make it really work.
I didn't come into this book knowing about the plot, so I would say I learned quite a bit from it. It's an easy read and not very long, so if you're looking for a quick bit of true crime that's not about a serial killer or a murder (specifically), this might be one to try out!