Upon reading the first couple pages of American Lightning,
one comes across a list of characters that immediately signals that
Howard Blum's work will read more like a mystery novel, than historical
monograph. Blum states, "I had no ambitions to be a historian….It's a reporter's
story." Really, Blum tries to play both roles. But the challenge with narrative
history is to walk the fine line between entertainment and education, and it is
easy to sense from his identification of American Lightning as a "sort of nonacademic
history" that he is aiming towards the former. While categorized as a
"narrative history," the need to make the book absorbing and compelling, should
not supersede...
Beyond the Book
"Crimes of the Century"Tacking down a precise date for when the term "Crime of the Century" was first utilized is not easy, but most scholars would attach the name of Jack the Ripper to the creation of that notorious slogan. The killing spree in 1888 that resulted in the deaths of at least five accountable victims and possibly ten more was never solved, but the fear it provoked in England, and across the world for that matter, is legendary.
In the United States, the list of highly publicized crimes is no less spectacular. Arguably, at the top of list is the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932. Yet, some 22 years earlier, Los Angeles newspaper headlines broadcast the shocking horror that Blum recaptures in American...
