***BOOK REVIEW*** Thunderstruck by Erik Larson

I asked for and received this book for Christmas. I started reading it on Christmas day and finished about a week later. This is fairly quick for me especially recently. This book was recommended by a Co-worker. In that recommendation I understood the story to be more inspirational than it turned out to be. So, in light of my expectation that there would be some inspiration in this book I was a bit disappointed. However, after finishing the book and resetting my expectation I can report that I enjoyed this book.
There are 2 main stories in this 'true story' based book. The author switches back and forth between one story based on Guglielmo Marconi the 'inventor' of wireless communication, and another story, a murder mystery. The story takes place in the late 1800's and early 1900's. It takes until the last few pages of the book before we know the connection between the 2 stories. This was a little annoying. I kept wondering if I missed something somewhere that gave me the connection.
Erik Larson did a good job using materials and reports written by and/or about the 2 main characters to construct a novel-like experience. However, there were times when the story started to feel a little like a travelogue especially concerning the Marconi character.
The book did a good job of making me attempt to place myself in the time of the story. Especially the ending, which I won't divulge here, really made me wonder what it would have been like to live in the time when it first became possible to communicate around the globe in a matter of seconds.
In the form of a story I was able to learn how wireless communication was invented. I found it fascinating to learn about the forces that conspired against Marconi in competition to monetize this emerging technology. It was an interesting note to learn that around the turn of the century many scientists were caught up in researching supernatural forces, seances, ouija boards etc. instead of focusing on the hard sciences and competing with Marconi. Marconi, a non-scientist, kept working and building and trying to make the technology work even without any of the underlying knowledge of the technical science of what he was working with. I learned that unlike many inventors that work without any backing and largely alone, Marconi had 10 of millions of dollars of backing and capital to work with. He became a very wealthy man at a very young age and it was directly due to the invention he was working on.
If you are interested in history and in invention around the turn of the century then you may enjoy this book that also wraps a true life murder mystery in between the scientific discovery.