Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

In 1910, Edwardian England was scandalized by a murder. It seems mild-mannered American Hawley Crippen had killed his wife, buried her remains in the cellar of their North London home and then gone on the run with his young mistress, his secretary Ethel Le Neve. A Scotland Yard inspector, already famous for his part in the Ripper investigation, discovered the murder and launched an international hunt for Crippen that climaxed in a trans-Atlantic chase between two ocean liners.The chase itself was novel, but what captured the imagination was the role played by a new and little understood technology: the wireless. Thanks to its inventor Marconi's obsessive fight to perfect his machine, the world was able to learn of events occurring in the middle of the Atlantic as they unfolded - something previously unthinkable. Commentators of the time all agreed that if not for Marconi, Crippen would have escaped. But Marconi had struggled to gain acceptance for his invention (some viewed it as a supernatural device, while distrust of foreigners remained prevalent in England and America).
It was the Crippen case that helped convince the world of the potential of Marconi's miracle technology, so accelerating the revolution that eventually produced the modern means of communication we take for granted today.With its cast of captivating characters, "Thunderstruck" is Erik Larson doing what he does brilliantly well: bringing together seemingly disparate yet inextricably linked lives to paint a fascinating and exciting portrait of an extraordinary age of cultural, social and technological change while evoking the darker side of human nature.

• ISBN10: 0553817086
• ISBN13: 9780553817089
• Publish Date: 2 January 2008 (first published 1 January 2006)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 24 October 2014
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Transworld Publishers Ltd
• Imprint: Bantam Books (Transworld Publishers a division of the Random House Group)
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 544
• Language: English

Reviews

[Eve1972]

I LOVED Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, so was really looking forward to reading Thunderstuck and it did not disappoint! Mr. Larson just has such a wonderful way of combining stories and making them compelling to read. That being said, the two separate stories in Thunderstruck (Dr. Crippin/Marconi) did not meld as well as those in The Devil in the White City, so it was like reading two seperate stories that connected for the briefest moment at the end. Because of that I found Thunderstruck to be slightly less enjoyable on the whole, but still a very entertaining and if you are a fan, worth the read!