Although my pick for Best Fiction is of a colorful and considerably multi-layered literary heft, fiction overall for me was put on the back burner in 2008 (bad choice of words perhaps - this isn’t Banned Books Week, is it?). I really found myself, then, pursuing and reading non-fiction titles more, specifically social history, an interest reflected not only in my top choice but in some honorable mentions, too. Speaking of mentioning...
FAVORITE NON-FICTION OF 2008
American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum
Howard Blum's American Lightning starts with the deadly October 1910 bombing of the offices of the Los Angeles Times -- publisher Otis Chandler was a bitter opponent of unions — which killed 21 people, turning the city into “the bloodiest arena in the Western World for Capital and Labor” and signifying an escalation in a devastating battle that was part and parcel of a war on some 100 American cities.
With “Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century,” American Lightning hits the historical ground running with edifying fact and enthralling imagination, and a cast of celebrated principals: detective William J. Burns, crusading attorney Clarence Darrow, and pioneering film director D.W. Griffith. With complex events and entanglements and an array of mired-up matters, it almost invariably reads like a novel — if you guessed suspense, mystery, and true crime, you’d be on target — with a page-turning narrative replete with twists and turns that have twists and turns, character studies etched in victory and vulnerability, and loose ends and sundry subplots so asunder you would think they could never be as one.
And yet, the circumstances that lead to the whys and wherefores of Burns, Darrow, and Griffith — “three men, each deeply flawed, each goaded by a powerful ego, each in his own way a practitioner of the actor’s craft, each possessing a unique genius, [who] would not only reshape their own lives and that of the times in which they lived” — occupying the same room briefly only once in their lives, itself constitutes a surprise ending fit for fiction, creating an evocative thunder with which Blum will get you lighting for the territories.
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