Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America

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Simon & Schuster, 1997 - Всего страниц: 875
Big Trouble begins on a snowy evening at Christmastime 1905 in the little town of Caldwell, Idaho, to which the state's former governor, Frank Steunenberg, had returned to head his family bank while contemplating his political future. As he walked home that night, he sensed all about him the bold, exuberant, unashamedly acquisitive spirit of Caldwell's young entrepreneurs, who - as his brother had written - were "here for the money". Like so many in the West at that time, these brothers believed their prospects for enriching themselves were limitless, that the future opened wide before them. And yet the governor suffered premonitions that he and his neighbors weren't fully in control of their own destiny, that something malign threatened their well-being. Now, as he followed the plume of his frozen breath, his boots crunching eight inches of freshly fallen snow, he turned through his garden gate and a bomb attached to the gatepost blew him "into eternity". Authorities threw a dragnet around the town, and soon the state placed the investigation in the hands of America's most renowned detective, James McParland of the Pinkerton Agency. Now sixty-two, McParland hankered after one more coup to top off his glittering career. Before long, he extracted an astonishing confession from an itinerant "sheep dealer" named Harry Orchard, who admitted setting the bomb that killed the governor and said the murder had been commissioned by "Big Bill" Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners in retaliation for the harsh tactics that Steunenberg had used to put down a miners' "insurrection" in northern Idaho six years before. In the summer of 1907 Haywood went on trial for his life in Boise, defended by Clarence Darrow, the country's most famous defense attorney, and prosecuted by William Borah, a golden-throated orator just elected Idaho's junior senator. For three months they did combat with lofty rhetoric and sly espionage. Big Trouble is both a narrative of a sensational murder case and a social tapestry. It is richly peopled with vivid characters: Operative 21, Pinkerton's daring undercover agent who penetrated to the heart of Darrow's defense team; E. H. Harriman, the icy railroad magnate; William Howard Taft, the gargantuan secretary of war; Jacob Fillius, the Denver mining lawyer who secretly bankrolled the prosecution on behalf of Colorado's mine owners; Eugene Debs, the fiery Socialist leader; the fearsome gunslingers Charlie Siringo and Bob Meldrum. At times the book seems like a nonfiction Ragtime, for some most unlikely figures found their way to the trial or its environs that summer: among them, Ethel Barrymore, the most glamorous young actress of her day; Walter Johnson, perhaps the greatest pitcher who ever threw a baseball; Hugo Munsterberg, director of the Harvard Psychology Laboratory; and Gifford Pinchot, the lanky chief forester of the United States and confidant of President Roosevelt.

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A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, J. Anthony Lukas is best known for his writings about the social upheaval of the 1960's and 70's. Lukas was a reporter for The New York Times when he won his first Pulitzer in 1968 for "The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick." The story tells of a teenager from an affluent Connecticut family who was beaten to death with her hippie boyfriend after turning to a life of drugs in the East Village. In 1971, Lukas followed with "Don't Shoot, We Are Your Children!" a book which examined the country's growing generation gap through the eyes of 10 youths. His second Pulitzer was awarded in 1985 for the book "Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families," which focused on the furor that erupted over court-ordered school busing in Boston during the 1970's. Lukas was a graduate of Harvard University and the Free University of Berlin. As a reporter for the Times, he was assigned to the Congo, India, New York and Chicago. He contributed articles to Gentleman's Quarterly, Rolling Stone, Harper's, The New Republic, and Psychology Today, among others. Throughout his career he held various teaching positions at Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Boston University. Lukas also hosted a radio program in New York from 1973 to 1974. Lukas was born in New York City in 1933. He married Linda Healey in 1982. His last work, "Big Trouble," which he completed shortly before his death, is a book about a turn-of-the-century murder trial in the West. Lukas committed suicide in June 1997, at the age of 64.

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