Monday morning, icy cold

So I finished Thunderstruck, the new Erik Larson, and it was very good. I won't say it wasn't as good as The Devil in the White City, because I think the subject matter of that book gave it a transcendent quality--the magical White City that was there, against all odds, against all sense, for less than a year, and then it was gone. The Marconi wireless, in addition to being something that did endure a while, didn't have that single-event quality that the World's Fair did. The story of the Marconi wireless has a beginning but not really an end--it's just there, and then it's either criticized or accepted. So in Thunderstruck, the murder half of the book really is more compelling, whereas I always said that it was a testament to Devil that the saga of building the massive fairgrounds in two years was actually more gripping than the serial killer plotline. (Both are nonfiction, by the way.) Here, the Crippen murder is the compelling storyline, but Larson manages to do something that the World's Fair/Holmes storyline didn't allow: the Marconi wireless actually becomes the means by which Crippen is caught--and Crippen is the means by which the effectiveness Marconi's wireless is finally proven. The two lines come together in a much more satisfying way, whereas Holmes and the Fair mostly seem to exist in proximity to each other, concurrently, but nothing more. More than anything, though, Larson is a consistently vivid storyteller, and I'm to the point where I pretty much buy anything he puts out without even knowing what it's about.


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