
American Lightning
Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century
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Narrated by:
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John H. Mayer
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By:
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Howard Blum
About this listen
It was an explosion that reverberated across the country—and into the very heart of early-twentieth-century America. On the morning of October 1, 1910, the walls of the Los Angeles Times Building buckled as a thunderous detonation sent men, machinery, and mortar rocketing into the night air. When at last the wreckage had been sifted and the hospital triage units consulted, twenty-one people were declared dead and dozens more injured. But as it turned out, this was just a prelude to the devastation that was to come.
In American Lightning, acclaimed author Howard Blum masterfully evokes the incredible circumstances that led to the original “crime of the century”—and an aftermath more dramatic than even the crime itself. With smoke still wafting up from the charred ruins, the city’s mayor reacts with undisguised excitement when he learns of the arrival, only that morning, of America’s greatest detective, William J. Burns, a former Secret Service man who has been likened to Sherlock Holmes. Surely Burns, already world famous for cracking unsolvable crimes and for his elaborate disguises, can run the perpetrators to ground. Through the work of many months, snowbound stakeouts, and brilliant forensic sleuthing, the great investigator finally identifies the men he believes are responsible for so much destruction. Stunningly, Burns accuses the men—labor activists with an apparent grudge against the Los Angeles Times’s fiercely anti-union owner—of not just one heinous deed but of being part of a terror wave involving hundreds of bombings.
While preparation is laid for America’s highest profile trial ever—and the forces of labor and capital wage hand-to-hand combat in the streets—two other notable figures are swept into the drama: industry-shaping filmmaker D.W. Griffith, who perceives in these events the possibility of great art and who will go on to alchemize his observations into the landmark film The Birth of a Nation; and crusading lawyer Clarence Darrow, committed to lend his eloquence to the defendants, though he will be driven to thoughts of suicide before events have fully played out.
Simultaneously offering the absorbing reading experience of a can’t-put-it-down thriller and the perception-altering resonance of a story whose reverberations continue even today, American Lightning is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.
©2008 Howard Blum (P)2008 Random House, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Extraordinary…[reads] like a horseless-carriage episode of ’24.’”—Wall Street Journal
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“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
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Story
Betty Pack was charming, beautiful, and intelligent - and she knew it. As an agent for Britain's MI6 and then America's OSS during World War II, these qualities proved crucial to her success. This is the remarkable story of this "Mata Hari from Minnesota" ( Time) and the passions that ruled her tempestuous life - a life filled with dangerous liaisons and death-defying missions vital to the Allied victory.
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Fascinating
- By Salui on 11-30-16
By: Howard Blum
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Dark Invasion
- 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America
- By: Howard Blum
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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When a “neutral” United States becomes a trading partner for the Allies early in World War I, the Germans implement a secret plan to strike back. A team of saboteurs - including an expert on germ warfare, a Harvard professor, and a brilliant, debonair spymaster - devise a series of “mysterious accidents” using explosives and biological weapons, to bring down vital targets such as ships, factories, livestock, and even captains of industry like J. P. Morgan. New York Police Inspector Tom Tunney, head of the department’s Bomb Squad, is assigned the difficult mission of stopping them.
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German American Intrigue in World War I
- By Hans Rigelman on 10-24-19
By: Howard Blum
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A Murder in Hollywood
- The Untold Story of Tinseltown's Most Shocking Crime
- By: Casey Sherman
- Narrated by: Casey Sherman
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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From the outside, Hollywood starlet Lana Turner seemed to have it all—a thriving film career, a beautiful daughter, and the kind of fame and fortune that most people could only dream of. But when the famous femme fatale began dating mobster Johnny Stompanato, thug for the infamous west coast mob boss Mickey Cohen, her personal life became violent and unpredictable. Lana's teenage daughter, Cheryl, watched her beloved mother's life deteriorate as Stompanato's intense jealousy took over.
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Not what you think…
- By christopher j rago on 02-26-24
By: Casey Sherman
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Night of the Assassins
- The Untold Story of Hitler's Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin
- By: Howard Blum
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The year is 1943, and the three Allied leaders - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin - are meeting for the first time at a top-secret conference in Tehran. But the Nazis have learned about the meeting, and Hitler sees it as his last chance to turn the tide. Although the war is undoubtedly lost, the Germans believe that perhaps a new set of Allied leaders might be willing to make a more reasonable peace in its aftermath. And so, a plan is devised - code name Operation Long Jump - to assassinate FDR, Churchill, and Stalin.
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Very inaccurate background.
- By Anna Goforth on 04-19-22
By: Howard Blum
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Reclaiming Parkland
- Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi, and the JFK Assassination in the New Hollywood
- By: James DiEugenio
- Narrated by: Brian Troxell
- Length: 19 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Reclaiming Parkland details the failed attempt of Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman - cofounder of the production company Playtone - to make Vincent Bugliosi’s mammoth book about the Kennedy assassination, Reclaiming History, into a miniseries. It exposes the questionable origins of Reclaiming History in a dubious mock trial for cable television, in which Bugliosi played the role of an attorney prosecuting Lee Harvey Oswald for murder, and how this formed the basis for the epic tome.
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The CIA in Hollywood is worth the price alone
- By Ksquared83 on 02-06-14
By: James DiEugenio
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A Death in Belmont
- By: Sebastian Junger
- Narrated by: Kevin Conway
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1963, with the city of Boston already terrified by a series of savage crimes known as the Boston Stranglings, a murder occurred in Belmont, just a few blocks from the house of Sebastian Junger's family, a murder that seemed to fit exactly the pattern of the Strangler. Roy Smith, a black man who had cleaned the victim's house that day, was convicted, but the terror of the Strangler continued.
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Excellent
- By Susanna on 01-13-15
By: Sebastian Junger
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Destiny of the Republic
- A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President
- By: Candice Millard
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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James A. Garfield may have been the most extraordinary man ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back. But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what happened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in turmoil.
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Marvelous, Magnificent, Millard
- By Mel on 02-08-12
By: Candice Millard
What listeners say about American Lightning
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Nancy
- 09-03-24
Excellent, start to finish!
I found this so interesting, so well-written and such excellent narration! In fact, I only knew bits of what happened but was almost sorry it ended..
Great narration too!
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- PearlGirl
- 09-28-08
Terrorism Existed in US Long Before 9/11
This is a story that would have been received differently prior to Sept 11, 2001. In the first half the author presents parallel two stories: DW Griffith, filmaker, and Billy Byrnes, private detective. In the second half, the personal and public battles rage around the allegedly illegal arrests and trials of the perpetrators of the 1910 LA Times bombing. The story drags in some spots but they are few. The reader has a nice voice and reads well.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Joseph
- 10-31-13
I found the secret!
I found this book to be quite compelling. The parallel stories of three men: D. W. Griffith, the pioneering American film director. William Burns, the private detective. And attorney Clarence Darrow. Their lives intersect around the bombing of the L.A. Times newspaper in 1910, which was called “the crime of the century” (until of course, the next “crime of the century” came along 22 years later, when Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped).
These three very different men provide us with a personal view of the huge changes taking place in America during this turbulent time. The story kept me interested and fed my curiosity.
I almost gave up on this book, however, because of the narrator’s style. I found that nearly every sentence was read with such drama that I continually wondered if I had missed something. The good news is that I discovered a solution that made the book much more enjoyable. I increased the speed of the narration to 1.25x the original and found it condensed those dramatic pauses to a point where the story worked; at least for me.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Austin G.
- 06-14-19
Great book
Narrator was great. I blazed through this book-it was very interesting and historically informative. As an amateur student of history, the most fascinating part was to hear about a few characters I had read about in other situations, such as Clarence Darrow who participated in the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, TN. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in historical nonfiction.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-09-17
excellent
i loved it so much, I'd like to buy the film rights! the details are immense but expertly woven together.
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- D. Littman
- 11-28-08
very interesting popular history
OK, this is not serious, footnoted analytical history, of the kind I like to read (or tell myself "it is good for me"), but that kind of history doesn't often lend itself to good audio-listening. American Lightning does. It recovers the biography of the Burns detective agency, a story I did not know, it does a nice recounting of the wave of "anarchist" and organized labor bombings of symbols of capitalism in the first decade of the 20th century, including how famed lawyer Clarence Darrow got intertwined with it. And it (less successfully) incorporates the roots of the modern movie business in New York & S California in that period too.
The book is well-written & very well-read. It passes by as if effortlessly as an audiobook, although I suspect it would be more annoying to read due to some of its organizational jumpiness.
I recommend it very highly. Both for itself and, if it tickles your interest further, in directing the reader to learn more about the three protagonists in other books elsewhere.
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25 people found this helpful
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- B & B
- 06-17-23
A fascinating tale
Never heard about this story but boy is it a doozy . Larger than life characters , some I only knew little if nothing about, are covered here very fairly I thought by Blum . He weaves the violence of the Labor Wars against the birth of Hollywood quite well .
Mayer's narration is spot on . He does a fine job with all the characters, and there is a lot, so he doesn't sound the same all the way through. Just enough so you know it's a different person talking. bad narration can kill even the best of audible books. No worries there. As for the cast of characters they are a varied lot . Some good and other downright despicable. Surprisingly to me Darrow comes across as a real sleazy character. But I'd definitely want him as my lawyer especially in this circumstance. Burns is another fascinating guy . D W Griffith who rounds out the 3 major characters really is establishing Hollywood as we will know it . All in all a great listen about a part of American history that I and I'm sure many never heard of. highly recommended .
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1 person found this helpful
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- Maura
- 03-17-09
Lightweight
This is an entertaining story but as a piece of history writing I found it very lightweight. Trying to tie the three main characters together was contrived and a lot of what was presented as fact struck me as likely the author's opinion or supposition rather than hard evidence.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Pat M
- 11-08-18
True Crime
Good true crime novel of the 1910s and reading if era. For those that enjoy true crime...a must read.
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- LeakyB
- 02-19-12
Not an easy listen
This history of three famous personas is interesting, but the author goes a bit too far at times in attributing thoughts and feelings to the characters. Sometimes it's armchair psychology (e.g., the feelings of Billy Burns' son Raymond with respect to his father), sometimes it's just stretching to make the characters seem more real. The author also makes excuses for the womanizing of Darrow, as if to make him a more sympathetic character, but not for Griffin. So we get more than history in the author's attempt to make this an interesting read.
But whether you think the story is interesting or not, you will have to get used to the narrator's style. If you listen to the Audible edition of the NY Times, you may have a sense of this style -- like he's reading the news. Every once in a while, he throws in a slight bit of emotion or accented speech, but it's pretty blase. Nothing personal -- just that I have gotten used to some very talented narrators here on Audible and this didn't come close. It makes it harder to pay attention to what he's reading.
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3 people found this helpful