It’s hard for me to describe how much I enjoyed this book.

It is perhaps the first Steampunk book, yet others have not copied it in a way that makes the original of the genre seem trite or predictable. Written in the 70s, set in Victorian London, Jeter set his narrative style as a homage to the works of the 1890s. The book reads with the intensity of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the probing questioning of H. G. Wells’s Time Machine, and the biting commentary and whimsy of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Along the way, Jeter pays homage to both Herman Melville and Jules Verne without cluttering his own story.

With a foundation firmly rooted in the traditions he was borrowing from, Jeter launched a new genre of stories, yet I had not heard of it until Stuart Greenfield gave me a copy for Christmas.

This
book
is
fantastic!

I really wanted to like this book. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a brilliant theologian and a hero, this book offered the opportunity to learn more of him as a person. The first part of this book does that very well.

Towards the middle of the book, however, Metaxas falls for the original sin of biographers: an infatuation with the subject. He starts making assertions about people’s motives that he can’t possibly know, and he starts degrading opposing arguments in a manner that has more to do with opinion than fact. When an argument is decried as “double-barreled flatulence,” it does nothing to the intended point of the argument, simply paints the person making it as a caricature of a Buffon.

Ironically, this does no service to Bonhoeffer. Instead of being a master-theologian countering an assault against the church, he becomes simply the child at the end of the “Emperor’s New Clothes.” An important part to be sure, but not one that serves to describe Bonhoffer’s scholarship.

Larson takes us right to the center of all the doubts that surround any tumultuous period of time. In Devil in the White City, he allows us to forget the Chicago Worlds Fair was a success long enough to feel the presenters’ strain in the chaotic days leading up to the event. In Dead Wake, we have a moment where it does seem possible that the Lusitania would make it. And here, in Thunderstruck, it seems possible that Marconi will fail.

In Thunderstruck, Larson weaves the stories of Marconi’s quest for transAtlantic wireless communication with a sensational contemporary murder case that was vying for public attention. Between the two stories, Larson captures Edwardian England’s feel, of the transatlantic liners that could shrink the Atlantic to 5 days, and a race to shrink the Atlantic further through wireless telegraphy.

I was born into Radio. It is no surprise that I enjoyed this book. The surprise came that Radio was secondary to the settings and people this book introduced me to. This book made nonfiction, admittedly dramatized nonfiction, as gripping as any novel.

If you have not read Eric Larson, start with Devil in the White City, but by all means, get to this book

The book is written as a series of short stories that introduce and develop different characters entwined by the overall plot. Frankly, the plot does not matter. The book is all about the characters. Many of the characters I don’t like, but I love almost all of them.

The magic in this book is it invites you to want to know more, and the more you find out, the more compelling it gets. I will warn you, however, it’s a brutal read. It does not pull punches, and it does not sugarcoat anything to make itself kinder or more accessable to the reader.

Both artists have done much more approachable work. Rodin’s “The Kiss” or “Thinker” don’t ask a lot of the viewer. The art is safely evocative of things the viewer is already interested in, and the viewer starts right there with the artist.

Winchester’s “Atlantic” or “Krakatoa” bring the awesome power of nature and the mmercantile history of nations to bear on the reader. Winchester does not have far to take the reader to find interest for the reader is already with him.