Not really mystery, because the book starts from the idea that everyone already knows Crippen is a murderer. What makes the book so enjoyable is that the true crime segments breaks up the sometimes tedious timeline of Marconi's long struggle, and in turn, Marconi's various adventures break up the ve...
After listening to Larson's Devil in the White City (and rereading it in fits and starts in book form), I put all of his audiobooks on my list. As much as I'm enjoying access to notes with the books, I find I enjoy the text read more than reading it myself. Another aspect of Larson's work I love i...
In classic Erik Larson style, Thunderstruck is told through parallel lives and events. In this case, more so than in The Devil in the White City, it's not immediately evident how the elements will come to intertwine. Guglielmo Marconi (below) was smart, contributed to society in the end, blah, bl...
There were a lot of confluences between the story of Marconi and the sensational murder of Belle Elmore. All the same, I just couldn't get terribly excited about this book. It was very slow to start, for one thing, and then there were endless chapters of Marconi trying and failing to get wireless co...
Seems like Larson was trying to do the same thing here as with The Devil in the White City - parallel stories of two historical personages/events that eventually come together. Although the intersection of Marconi (or at least Marconi's technology) and putative murderer Hawley Crippen (since this b...
ThunderstruckThunderstruck is the first work Erik Larson’s that I have felt like lacked…well, thunder. Mr. Larsen is one of a hand full of non-fiction writers, along with Jon Meacham, Alex Kershaw, and Laura Hillenbrand, whose writing stood out to me in the past year. In fairness to Mr. Larson, it ...
It's an axiom that Great Men (and, one supposes, Great Women) are Unpleasant People. Larson's treatment of Guglielmo Marconi, great-great-great grandfather of the device you're reading this on, does nothing to dispel the miasma of meanness from him. What a rotten human being! How completely insensit...
I LOVED Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, so was really looking forward to reading Thunderstuck and it did not disappoint! Mr. Larson just has such a wonderful way of combining stories and making them compelling to read. That being said, the two separate stories in Thunderstruck (Dr. Crippi...
First off, while this is an interesting and engaging story, it is not the top-notch book that was Devil in the White City. Here, Larson tells a parallel tale of Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the wireless, and Hawley Crippen, a relative nobody who gained infamy by doing away with his wife. Where the...
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