American Lightning - Terror, Mystery, and the Birth of Hollywood

Zusatztext 105588307 Informationen zum Autor HOWARD BLUM is the author of eight previous books, including the national bestsellers Wanted!, The Gold of Exodus , and Gangland . Currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair , Blum was also a reporter at the New York Times , where he won numerous journalism awards and was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting. Klappentext In this masterpiece of narrative history, acclaimed author Howard Blum evokes the original "crime of the century" and an aftermath even more dramatic than the crime itself-a seminal episode in America's history that would spark national debate and draw into its orbit master sleuth William J. Burns, crusading lawyer Clarence Darrow, and industry-shaping filmmaker D. W. Griffith. "Hugely engaging . . . has tremendous verve . . . American Lightning throws valuable new light on an episode that seems, for us today, particularly pertinent. Terrorism happened here." -Los Angeles Times "A fast-moving, skillfully constructed account . . . Blum's style is cinematic." -Chicago Sun-Times "Compelling . . . a tense detective story." -Seattle Times "A thumping-good drumroll of narrative history . . . the cross-country manhunt reads like a great mystery novel . . . Blum blows the dust off a page of America's own incendiary past and brings it to pulsating life." -Dallas Morning News chapter one It was nearly midnight on September 4, 1910, in Peoria, Illinois, when the dark sky above the train yard opened and a pelting rain suddenly poured down. Surprised, the night watchman ran to a boxcar for shelter. That decision saved his life. He was safely inside when the bomb exploded. It was a clock bomb, rather crudely made but fueled by ten gallons of nitroglycerin. It had been placed under a nearby railway car transporting an eighty-ton girder. The force of the blast knocked the watchman to the boxcar’s wooden floor. Outside the girder shot high into the sky. Shards of metal showered down, spears falling like iron lightning bolts amid the hard, hammering rain. Within hours the president of the McClintic-Marshall Iron Works, the company that had fabricated the girder for a bridge being built across the Illinois River, hired the Burns Detective Agency to investigate the blast. A local Burns operative left his bed and hurried to the scene. Under a freight car carrying a second huge girder, he discovered a clock bomb that had failed to explode; the battery had lost its voltage. The clock had also been set for 11 hours and 59 minutes and 59 seconds. This would’ve allowed sufficient time for any escape. The culprits would be long gone, and, he anticipated, difficult to trace. Outside the yard he found an empty nitroglycerin can and a small, neatly piled hill of sawdust. He brought the can and the unexploded bomb to the attention of the Peoria police captain at the scene. The captain glanced at the device, shook his head in a gesture of disgust at the criminals who had planted it, and then walked off to interview the night watchman. Later, after the police had left, the Burns man retrieved the can and the bomb. He also gathered up the sawdust particles. He put all the evidence—the nitroglycerin can, the unexploded bomb, and the sawdust— into a large box and sent it to the agency’s headquarters in Chicago. For weeks the box sat on a shelf in the evidence room, ignored and unopened. It was only after the events in Los Angeles that Billy Burns began to suspect its significance. chapter two California, here we come! Over the hills and across the valleys of America, from the icy, windswept prairies and the snowbound farmlands of the Midwest, people flocked to Los Angeles. As the twentieth century began, the city’s chamber of commerce spread the word that sunshine would cure any illness, that ripe oranges hung from...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Howard Blum
• Editore: Crown Publishing Group
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 06.10.2009
• EAN: 9780307346957
• ISBN: 978-0-307-34695-7
• Pagine: 368
• Dimensioni: 131 mm x 203 mm x 20 mm
• Categorie: Saggistica > Storia > Altro; Scienze umane, arte, musica > Storia > Storia dei paesi e delle regioni