Thunderstruck by Erik Larson

The obvious comparison here is to The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson's nonfiction bestseller from several years ago. In that book, Larson tells two stories in parallel: the story of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and the story of H. H. Holmes, a serial killer who took advantage of the fair to stage many of his killings. I found the book fascinating and engrossing, and I thought that the account of the creation of the World Fair was every bit as interesting as the real-life murder story told simultaneously.

I was slow to pick up Thunderstruck because I knew ahead of time that Larson had essentially recycled the successful formula of The Devil in the White City. This time, the two stories told in parallel were the tale of Marconi's invention of wireless telegraphy, and the tale of a man who was captured for the murder of his wife because of the new technology. From everything I had heard, the connection was more of a stretch, and the stories didn't weave together nearly as well as in the first book.

Still, I enjoyed The Devil in the White City enough that I finally decided I couldn't not give Thunderstruck a try. And I was pleasantly surprised. Although Larson followed the same formula, it didn't feel like he was trying to pull off the same trick twice. It was just a formula that worked really well to tell the kind of story he wanted to tell.

First, my criticisms. It took me much longer to get into Thunderstruck. For the first half of the book, I didn't find either story line as interesting as the two story lines in Devil in the White City. The story of Dr. Crippen's marriage was tedious, and the story of the invention of wireless was confusing (no one really understood how it worked as it was invented, and Larson didn't bother to try to help the reader understand) and suffered from an unlikeable protagonist. While I found myself rooting for the architect Daniel Burnham as he sought to bring the World's Fair to Chicago, it was hard to really care that Marconi achieved success before any other inventor, or that he earned his due credit.

And there was no obvious connection to the two stories.

And so about halfway through the novel, being committed but wanting to free myself up for something else, I decided to dig in and push through the rest as quickly as possible. And right about then, I finally got caught up in the stories. I still expected that they wouldn't come together nicely in the end (based on reviews I'd read), but I was finding them both interesting in and of themselves. The book became a page-turner. And when the two stories finally did intersect, in two or three short chapters that served as the climax of the entire book, I was struck by how momentous and important and relevant that brief intersection actually was. Suddenly, to me, the book seemed to have been about something entirely different than what I was expecting.

Would I recommend this book? If you have any interest at all and haven't yet read The Devil in the White City, I'd recommend that one first. Then, if you really enjoy that book, sure, pick up Thunderstruck. It's sort of fun to get absorbed in an era, and I think that's what I liked about both of the books. Just be prepared to do a little work to get absorbed with this one.