What I've Read: American Lightning

Long flights and vacations are great for reading books, or listening to them, depending on how you travel. After finishing the Jacobs book, I dove right in and conquered another in no time.

These historical narrative nonfiction books are just cool. I really like reading them. They are a growing form of nonfiction where instead of just laying bare the facts and lulling you to sleep, the books are written a little bit more like a 300-page magazine article. This allows someone like me to grasp all the content without feeling like a total moron. I put great books like Cocaine, Salt, How Soccer Explains the World, Devil in the White City and Thunderstruck in this genre.

American Lightning is quite interesting because it tells of the intersection of three lives around a singular event. A famous detective, the man who would create Hollywood and a newspaper baron who may be pushing the limits of the definition of "editorializing." All three of these men converge around the bombing of the LA Times building at the turn of the century. The book is not a long read, and faster readers than myself could blow through it in no time. And when you have a book in which it's interesting subject matter, you'll learn something and it's written in an engaging voice, you can't go wrong.