Books

Check out our picks of this month’s page turners

BY MICHAEL J. BANDLER

American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century
Howard Blum
(Crown Publishing, 352 pages, $25)

It’s a pleasure, when perusing nonfiction, to come across a shard of history that—even if not lost or forgotten—has been buried by decades of subsequent events. Take the destruction of the Los Angeles Times building in the fall of 1910 by anarchists, as capital and labor struggled over industrial freedom across America.

Critics might challenge the reference to “the crime of the century” in light of the murder of Stanford White, the Lindbergh kidnapping and other heinous candidates. But no matter. Through meticulous research and compelling storytelling, Blum brings together a seemingly disparate cast that includes attorney Clarence Darrow; silent film director D.W. Griffith and his muse Mary Pickford; labor leader Samuel Gompers; the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens; and—first among equals—William J. Burns, detective extraordinaire. He adds not only the time’s leading anarchists, but also such themes as LA’s crucial water issue (pivotal to the film Chinatown); the rise of movies as “entertainment of the working man;” the invention of the listening device (today’s “bug”); and the battle for industrial freedom. The hero is Burns, but the story is larger than one man’s life, and—as such—a wide-screen epic fashioned from this sliver of the past.

A Cure for Night
Justin Peacock
(Doubleday, 352 pages, $25)

This debut novelist and attorney describes the “four-in-the-morning” public defenders in his book as “the night’s janitors.”

Their cases involve people who have done something they’d never dream of doing in broad daylight. A double street shooting in Brooklyn—with no clear-cut motivation at the outset, but with racial overtones—is being investigated by Joel Deveraux, a young corporate lawyer-cum-public defender who has short-circuited his career through substance abuse. Starting over, yet still bedeviled by his past, this dogged and damaged figure builds his argument gradually, interweaving seemingly unrelated cases and external factors. Once the story is in the climactic trial phase, Peacock offers a sizzling verbal tennis match that enhances this intricate tale. This is a smart, robust legal thriller.

The Galloping Ghost Red Grange: An American Football Legend
Gary Andrew Poole
(Houghton Mifflin, 304 pages, $25)

Eighty-five years ago this fall, a trim, muscular University of Illinois sophomore caught a pass for a touchdown, swept through the Nebraska line for a second one, then straight-armed his opponents as he raced down the sidelines for a 65-yard punt return—thus Harold “Red” Grange began his celebrated trek towards the pantheon of American sports. But his mythic career in college and pro ball in the 1920s had ebbs and flows, in part due to the presence of his imaginative yet conniving manager. Grange told his own story in a 1953 memoir, but there’s been little else till now. In this breezy, occasionally inelegantly written portrait, Gary Andrew Poole effectively uses a range of sources, particularly in placing Grange within pro football’s contentious fledgling era.