Joe speaks very highly of this book. It was my assignment from him for the year. As I have said, non-fiction is not my preferred type of book per se, but as Dave said the other day, part of the point of this exercise is to expand our horizons a bit.
Hellhound is actually pretty well written. It took me a bit of time to get into the rhythm of the book, more out of a style difference than any fault of the writer. In fact, Hampdon Sides specifically divulges that he wrote the book in a style that "employs the novelist's methods without his license". This is a style he discovered from the Memphis historian Shelby Foote, and it serves the material well.
When I checked the book out of the library, I noticed it was larger than I expected, so I did a quick flip through it, and I was pretty startled to find a veritable volume of footnotes/references at the back. At first, this made me wonder how much like a doctoral thesis this might end up being. As I mentioned above though, I came to appreciate the style of the work once I got in the rhythm of it.
Sides goes to great detail to make a historically accurate synopsis of the weeks leading up to MLK's assassination; the mood of King and his closest advisers. He also does a good job laying out how James Earl Ray operated and behaved. Its sort of spooky to think that even someone with such little formal education and little training was able to work his way into a position to make an attempt, much less successfully kill King.
I was also struck by the basic attitude towards imprisonment that Ray had, and how clever he obviously was at making the repeated escapes (albeit with the likely assistance of his brothers).
Overall, a good overview of the whole experience, and I thought it was a good window into those pivotal months the America into which I was born, and has shaped my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment