“Within twenty-four hours Captain Kendall would discover that his ship had become the most famous vessel afloat and that he himself had become the subject of breakfast conversation from Broadway in New York to Piccadilly in London.”
In the early 1900s, the world is changing rapidly. Amidst the race to get wireless technology to transmit messages across the ocean, society is giving way to women who dye their hair and have lovers on the side without fear. Thunderstruck by Erik Larsen tells the true story of when a murder suspect was caught only by the means of the latest technology of the day finally working. Without that, he would have escaped by boat from Europe to Canada and lived happily with his mistress.
After reading Dead Wake by Erik Larsen, I knew I had to read more of his books. He has the gift of bringing history alive to read like a fiction novel. Dead Wake told the tale of the sinking of the Lusitania and I learned a lot from that book. Thunderstruck was available as an audiobook when I was painting rooms and I learned a lot from this book, too.
Guglielmo Marconi is an inventor working on transmitting messages from a sender to a receiver without wires. He doesn’t know how it works or why, but experiments over and over until he finds the combinations of metals, power and antennas that lets the messages transmit farther and farther. Yet, his ambition is to make money so he doesn’t share his technology with the scientific world and they thwart him at every turn. While he’s working on sending messages from ships to shore, a medicine man named Hawley Harvey Crippen is suffering in a marriage to a larger-than-life woman who berates him at every turn, flaunts to men on stage and drains their finances. He develops a relationship with his typist and seeks to escape his marriage. When his wife finally agrees that they should end the marriage, she disappears and her friends gets suspicious. The trail leads to the cellar, but by that time, Crippen and his lover have started their escape.
Fans of great fiction, history and/or crime books, will enjoy Thunderstruck. Even if you don’t usually enjoy reading non-fiction, this book will captivate you and keep you wondering what will happen next. The book is for high school age readers and older as it discusses murder, adultery, uses some adult language and describes the corpse.
Do you enjoy non-fiction? If not, do you think you would enjoy this book? Share on the blog!