Add Prime to get Fast, Free delivery

Kindle
$9.99

Available instantly

Audiobook
$0.00
with membership trial

Hardcover
$14.81

Paperback
$9.62

$9.62 with 49 percent savings

List Price: $18.99

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Thursday, June 5 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35

Or Prime members get FREE delivery Tomorrow, June 1. Order within 4 hrs 36 mins.

Arrives 14 days before Father's Day

In Stock

$$9.62 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Enhancements you chose aren't available for this seller. Details

${cardName} not available for the seller you chose

${cardName} unavailable for quantities greater than ${maxQuantity}.

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

30-day refund/replacement

Payment

Secure transaction

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

$7.92

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

This item shows wear including moderate wear to edges and cover. This item shows wear including moderate wear to edges and cover. See less

FREE delivery Thursday, June 5 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35. Order within 4 hrs 36 mins

Arrives 10 days before Father's Day

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

$$9.62 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Enhancements you chose aren't available for this seller. Details

${cardName} not available for the seller you chose

${cardName} unavailable for quantities greater than ${maxQuantity}.

Sold by Jenson Books Inc and Fulfilled by Amazon.

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (172) from $1.18

ThunderstruckAmazon Videos

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

2 VIDEOS

Follow the author

Erik Larson

Follow

Thunderstruck Paperback – September 25, 2007

by Erik Larson (Author)

8,082 ratings

See all formats and editions

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$9.62","priceAmount":9.62,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"9","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"62","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"LHvAO5HT0d2vGjeTnBNQDYtYj4cl3acrJSGiKtunGm6%2FUILULFFgzL5yvq82%2Fch%2FWADjKU5tYiJ5b01c82kXpMt9TzBsv0f3uDjk5lNKKCn5lTJob7omHpj%2BavUWhOw4DvkHV%2BWK%2B3Y%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$7.92","priceAmount":7.92,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"7","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"92","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"LHvAO5HT0d2vGjeTnBNQDYtYj4cl3acrR4kVP4F5xE%2FVjrdH0GbImaHdAKFd%2BXEHzm89yMbnobBp1jvZIMlAIHUUopojzdRi%2FOVLWVoH%2FufnNkPPg%2BrdU4SSpItGcA1y5f%2FNFhZmE7nFs2lCIN4J6wrqVifc3ceAo6eKRuTcHC7wFHQY3q35IjnmY3ldd2oY","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world’s “great hush.”

In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.

Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest ocean liners; scientific advances dazzled the public with visions of a world transformed; and the rich outdid one another with ostentatious displays of wealth. Against this background, Marconi races against incredible odds and relentless skepticism to perfect his invention: the wireless, a prime catalyst for the emergence of the world we know today. Meanwhile, Crippen, “the kindest of men,” nearly commits the perfect murder.

With his unparalleled narrative skills, Erik Larson guides us through a relentlessly suspenseful chase over the waters of the North Atlantic. Along the way, he tells of a sad and tragic love affair that was described on the front pages of newspapers around the world, a chief inspector who found himself strangely sympathetic to the killer and his lover, and a driven and compelling inventor who transformed the way we communicate.

From the Publisher

A true story weaving two men’s lives together with love, murder, invention, and the end of the...

	The Splendid and the Vile	The Devil in the White City	In the Garden of Beasts	Dead Wake	Isaacs’s Storm	Lethal Passage
			Buying Options	Buying Options
Customer Reviews	44,339	28,959	—	33,052	9,911	530
Price	$15.74	$7.68	— no data	$8.99	$12.19	$12.89
	An intimate chronicle of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz—an inspiring portrait of courage and leadership in a time of unprecedented crisis.	The true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death.	A dazzling account and cautionary tale set during the years before WWII.	A true story weaving two men’s lives together with love, murder, invention, and the end of the world’s “great hush.”	The true story of the deadliest hurricane in history.	This devastating book illuminates America's gun culture – and tells the story of how a disturbed teenager was able to buy a weapon advertised as "the gun that made the eighties roar."

Editorial Reviews

Review

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Larson is a marvelous writer...superb at creating characters with a few short strokes.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Larson's gift for rendering an historical era with vibrant tactility and filling it with surprising personalities makes Thunderstruck an irresistible tale...He beautifully captures the awe that greeted early wireless transmissions on shipboard...he restores life to this fascinating, long-lost world.” —Washington Post

“A ripping yarn of murder and invention.” —Los Angeles Times

“Of all the non-fiction writers working today, Erik Larson seems to have the most delicious fun...for his newest, destined-to-delight book, Thunderstruck, Larson has turned his sights on Edwardian London, a place alive with new science and seances, anonymous crowds and some stunningly peculiar personalities.”
—Chicago Tribune

“[Larson] interweaves gripping storylines about a cryptic murderer and the race for technology in the early 20th century. An edge-of-the-seat read.” —People

“Captivating...with Thunderstruck, Larson has selected another enthralling tale—two of them, actually...[he] peppers the narrative with an engaging array of secondary figures and fills the margins with rich tangential period details...Larson has once again crafted a popular history narrative that is stylistically closer to a smartly plotted novel.” —Miami Herald

“As he did with The Devil in the White City, Larson has created an intense, intelligent page turner that shows how the march of progress and innovation affect both the world at large and the lives of everyday people.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Captivating...with Thunderstruck, Larson again demonstrates that he's one of the best nonfiction writers around and proves that real-life murders can be as compelling to read about as fictional ones.” —Dallas/Forth Worth Star-Telegram

“[Larson] captures the human capacity for wonder at the turn of the century...[he] has perfected a narrative form of his own invention.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

“An enthralling narrative and vivid descriptions...Larson has done a marvelous job of bringing the distinct stories together in his own unique way. Simply fantastic!”
—Library Journal

“Splendid, beautifully written...Thunderstruck triumphantly resurrects the spirit of another age, when one man's public genius linked the world, while another's private turmoil made him a symbol of the end of "the great hush" and the first victim of a new era when instant communication, now inescapable, conquered the world.”
—Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Erik Larson is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, most recently The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, which examines how Winston Churchill and his “Secret Circle” went about surviving the German air campaign of 1940-41. Larson’s The Devil in the White City is set to be a Hulu limited series; his In the Garden of Beasts is under option by Tom Hanks for a feature film. He recently published an audio-original ghost story, No One Goes Alone, which has been optioned by Chernin Entertainment, in association with Netflix. His Thunderstruck has been optioned by Sony Pictures Television for a limited TV series. Larson lives in Manhattan with his wife, who is a writer and retired neonatologist; they have three grown daughters.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Ghosts and Gunfire Distraction

In the ardently held view of one camp, the story had its rightful beginning on the night of June 4, 1894, at 21 Albemarle Street, London, the address of the Royal Institution. Though one of Britain’s most august scientific bodies, it occupied a building of modest proportion, only three floors. The false columns affixed to its facade were an afterthought, meant to impart a little grandeur. It housed a lecture hall, a laboratory, living quarters, and a bar where members could gather to discuss the latest scientific advances.
Inside the hall, a physicist of great renown readied himself to deliver the evening’s presentation. He hoped to startle his audience, certainly, but otherwise he had no inkling that this lecture would prove the most important of his life and a source of conflict for decades to come. His name was Oliver Lodge, and really the outcome was his own fault— another manifestation of what even he acknowledged to be a fundamental flaw in how he approached his work. In the moments remaining before his talk, he made one last check of an array of electrical apparatus positioned on a demonstration table, some of it familiar, most unlike anything seen before in this hall.
Outside on Albemarle Street the police confronted their usual traffic problem. Scores of carriages crowded the street and gave it the look of a great black seam of coal. While the air in the surrounding neighborhood of Mayfair was scented with lime and the rich cloying sweetness of hothouse flowers, here the street stank of urine and manure, despite the efforts of the young, red-shirted “street orderlies” who moved among the horses collecting ill-timed deposits. Officers of the Metropolitan Police directed drivers to be quick about exiting the street once their passengers had departed. The men wore black, the women gowns.
Established in 1799 for the “diffusion of knowledge, and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical improvements,” the Royal Institution had been the scene of great discoveries. Within its laboratories Humphry Davy had found sodium and potassium and devised the miner’s safety lamp, and Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, the phenomenon whereby electricity running through one circuit induces a current in another. The institution’s lectures, the “Friday Evening Discourses,” became so popular, the traffic outside so chaotic, that London officials were forced to turn Albemarle into London’s first one-way street.
Lodge was a professor of physics at the new University College of Liverpool, where his laboratory was housed in a space that once had been the padded cell of a lunatic asylum. At first glance he seemed the embodiment of established British science. He wore a heavy beard misted with gray, and his head—“the great head,” as a friend put it—was eggshell bald to a point just above his ears, where his hair swept back into a tangle of curls. He stood six feet three inches tall and weighed about 210 pounds. A young woman once reported that the experience of dancing with Lodge had been akin to dancing with the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Though considered a kind man, in his youth Lodge had exhibited a cruel vein that, as he grew older, caused him regret and astonishment. While a student at a small school, Combs Rectory, he had formed a club, the Combs Rectory Birds’ Nest Destroying Society, whose members hunted nests and ransacked them, smashing eggs and killing fledglings, then firing at the parent birds with slingshots. Lodge recalled once beating a dog with a toy whip but dismissed this incident as an artifact of childhood cruelty. “Whatever faults I may have,” he wrote in his memoir, “cruelty is not one of them; it is the one thing that is utterly repugnant.”
Lodge had come of age during a time when scientists began to coax from the mists a host of previously invisible phenomena, particularly in the realm of electricity and magnetism. He recalled how lectures at the Royal Institution would set his imagination alight. “I have walked back through the streets of London, or across Fitzroy Square, with a sense of unreality in everything around, an opening up of deep things in the universe, which put all ordinary objects of sense into the shade, so that the square and its railings, the houses, the carts, and the people, seemed like shadowy unrealities, phantasmal appearances, partly screening, but partly permeated by, the mental and spiritual reality behind.”
The Royal Institution became for Lodge “a sort of sacred place,” he wrote, “where pure science was enthroned to be worshipped for its own sake.” He believed the finest science was theoretical science, and he scorned what he and other like-minded scientists called “practicians,” the new heathen, inventors and engineers and tinkerers who eschewed theoretical research for blind experimentation and whose motive was commercial gain. Lodge once described the patent process as “inappropriate and repulsive.”
As his career advanced, he too was asked to deliver Friday Evening Discourses, and he reveled in the opportunity to put nature’s secrets on display. When a scientific breakthrough occurred, he tried to be first to bring it to public notice, a pattern he had begun as early as 1877, when he acquired one of the first phonographs and brought it to England for a public demonstration, but his infatuation with the new had a corollary effect: a vulnerability to distraction. He exhibited a lofty dilettantism that late in life he acknowledged had been a fatal flaw. “As it is,” he wrote, “I have taken an interest in many subjects, and spread myself over a considerable range—a procedure which, I suppose, has been good for my education, though not so prolific of results.” Whenever his scientific research threatened to lead to a breakthrough, he wrote, “I became afflicted with a kind of excitement which caused me to pause and not pursue that path to the luminous end. . . . It is an odd feeling, and has been the cause of my not clinching many subjects, not following up the path on which I had set my feet.”
To the dismay of peers, one of his greatest distractions was the world of the supernatural. He was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, established in 1882 by a group of level-headed souls, mostly scientists and philosophers, to bring scientific scrutiny to ghosts, séances, telepathy, and other paranormal events, or as the society stated in each issue of its Journal, “to examine without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit, those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis.” The society’s constitution stated that membership did not imply belief in “physical forces other than those recognized by Physical Science.” That the SPR had a Committee on Haunted Houses deterred no one. Its membership expanded quickly to include sixty university dons and some of the brightest lights of the era, among them John Ruskin, H. G. Wells, William E. Gladstone, Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain), and the Rev. C. L. Dodgson (with the equally prominent pen name Lewis Carroll). The roster also listed Arthur Balfour, a future prime minister of England, and William James, a pioneer in psychology, who by the summer of 1894 had been named the society’s president.
It was Lodge’s inquisitiveness, not a belief in ghosts, that first drove him to become a member of the SPR. The occult was for him just one more invisible realm worthy of exploration, the outermost province of the emerging science of psychology. The unveiling during Lodge’s life of so many hitherto unimagined physical phenomena, among them Heinrich Hertz’s discovery of electromagnetic waves, suggested to him that the world of the mind must harbor secrets of its own. The fact that waves could travel through the ether seemed to confirm the existence of another plane of reality. If one could send electromagnetic waves through the ether, was it such an outrageous next step to suppose that the spiritual essence of human beings, an electromagnetic soul, might also exist within the ether and thus explain the hauntings and spirit rappings that had become such a fixture of common legend? Reports of ghosts inhabiting country houses, poltergeists rattling abbeys, spirits knocking on tables during séances—all these in the eyes of Lodge and fellow members of the society seemed as worthy of dispassionate analysis as the invisible travels of an electromagnetic wave.
Within a few years of his joining the SPR, however, events challenged Lodge’s ability to maintain his scientific remove. In Boston William James began hearing from his own family about a certain “Mrs. Piper”—Lenore Piper—a medium who was gaining notoriety for possessing strange powers. Intending to expose her as a fraud, James arranged a sitting and found himself enthralled. He suggested that the society invite Mrs. Piper to England for a series of experiments. She and her two daughters sailed to Liverpool in November 1889 and then traveled to Cambridge, where a sequence of sittings took place under the close observation of SPR members. Lodge arranged a sitting of his own and suddenly found himself listening to his dead aunt Anne, a beloved woman of lively intellect who had abetted his drive to become a scientist against the wishes of his father. She once had told Lodge that after her death she would come back to visit if she could, and now, in a voice he remembered, she reminded him of that promise. “This,” he wrote, “was an unusual thing to happen.”
To Lodge, the encounter seemed proof that some part of the human mind persisted even after death. It left him, he wrote, “thoroughly convinced not only of human survival, but of the power to communicate, under certain conditions, with those left behind on the earth.”
Partly because of his diverse interests and his delight in new discoveries, by June 1894 he had become one of the Royal Institution’s most popular speakers.

The evening’s lecture was entitled “The Work of Hertz.” Heinrich Hertz had died earlier in the year, and the institution invited Lodge to talk about his experiments, a task to which Lodge readily assented. Lodge had a deep respect for Hertz; he also believed that if not for his own fatal propensity for distraction, he might have beaten Hertz to the history books. In his memoir, Lodge stopped just short of claiming that he himself not Hertz, was first to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves. And indeed Lodge had come close, but instead of pursuing certain tantalizing findings, he had dropped the work and buried his results in a quotidian paper on lightning conductors.
Every seat in the lecture hall was filled. Lodge spoke for a few moments, then began his demonstration. He set off a spark. The gun- shot crack jolted the audience to full attention. Still more startling was the fact that this spark caused a reaction—a flash of light—in a distant, unattached electrical apparatus. The central component of this apparatus was a device Lodge had designed, which he called a “coherer,” a tube filled with minute metal filings, and which he had inserted into a conventional electric circuit. Initially the filings had no power to conduct electricity, but when Lodge generated the spark and thus launched electromag- netic waves into the hall, the filings suddenly became conductors—they “cohered”—and allowed current to flow. By tapping the tube with his finger, Lodge returned the filings to their nonconductive state, and the circuit went dead.
Though seemingly a simple thing, in fact the audience had never seen anything like it: Lodge had harnessed invisible energy, Hertz’s waves, to cause a reaction in a remote device, without intervening wires. The applause came like thunder.
Afterward Lord Rayleigh, a distinguished mathematician and physicist and secretary of the Royal Society, came up to Lodge to congratulate him. He knew of Lodge’s tendency toward distraction. What Lodge had just demonstrated seemed a path that even he might find worthy of focus. “Well, now you can go ahead,” Rayleigh told Lodge. “There is your life work!”
But Lodge did not take Lord Rayleigh’s advice. Instead, once again exhibiting his inability to pursue one theme of research to conclusion, he left for a vacation in Europe that included a scientific foray into a very different realm. He traveled to the Ile Roubaud, a small island in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of France, where soon very strange things began to happen and he found himself distracted anew, at what would prove to be a critical moment in his career and in the history of science.
For even as Lodge conducted his new explorations on the Ile Roubaud, far to the south someone else was hard at work—ingeniously, energetically, compulsively—exploring the powers of the invisible world, with the same tools Lodge had used for his demonstration at the Royal Institution, much to Lodge’s eventual consternation and regret.

The Great Hush

It was not precisely a vision, like some sighting of the Madonna in a tree trunk, but rather a certainty, a declarative sentence that entered his brain. Unlike other lightning-strike ideas, this one did not fade and blur but retained its surety and concrete quality. Later Marconi would say there was a divine aspect to it, as though he had been chosen over all others to receive the idea. At first it perplexed him—the question, why him, why not Oliver Lodge, or for that matter Thomas Edison?
The idea arrived in the most prosaic of ways. In that summer of 1894, when he was twenty years old, his parents resolved to escape the extraordinary heat that had settled over Europe by moving to higher and cooler ground. They fled Bologna for the town of Biella in the Italian Alps, just below the Santuario di Oropa, a complex of sacred buildings devoted to the legend of the Black Madonna. During the family’s stay, he happened to acquire a copy of a journal called Il Nuovo Cimento, in which he read an obituary of Heinrich Hertz written by Augusto Righi, a neighbor and a physics professor at the University of Bologna. Something in the article produced the intellectual equivalent of a spark and in that moment caused his thoughts to realign, like the filings in a Lodge coherer.
“My chief trouble was that the idea was so elementary, so simple in logic that it seemed difficult to believe no one else had thought of putting it into practice,” he said later. “In fact Oliver Lodge had, but he had missed the correct answer by a fraction. The idea was so real to me that I did not realize that to others the theory might appear quite fantastic.”
What he hoped to do—expected to do—was to send messages over long distances through the air using Hertz’s invisible waves. Nothing in the laws of physics as then understood even hinted that such a feat might be possible. Quite the opposite. To the rest of the scientific world what he now proposed was the stuff of magic shows and séances, a kind of electric telepathy.
His great advantage, as it happens, was his ignorance—and his mother’s aversion to priests.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 25, 2007
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400080673
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400080670
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.17 x 1.01 x 7.96 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #12,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5 in Historical British Biographies
- #5 in History of Technology
- #48 in Murder & Mayhem True Accounts

Customer Reviews:
8,082 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Erik Larson

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Erik Larson is the author of six previous national bestsellers—The Splendid and the Vile, Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts, Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and Isaac’s Storm—which have collectively sold more than twelve million copies. His books have been published in nearly forty countries.

Customer reviews

8,082 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Review this product

Write a customer review

Customers say

Customers find the book engaging, with well-researched stories that blend fascinating moments and detailed historical information. The writing is praised for its perfect prose and ability to convert history into a narrative, while the character development brings characters to life and provides insight into their personalities. Customers appreciate the book's educational value and its great outline of the birth of wireless communication. The pacing receives mixed reactions, with some finding it a fast read while others note it starts slow.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Select to learn more

Readability Story quality Writing quality Plot Character development Educational value History of wireless technology Pacing

549 customers mention "Readability"480 positive69 negative

Customers find the book highly readable and entertaining, keeping their interest throughout.

"...person to accomplish something incredible, something innovative and inventive, without being formally schooled in that area...." Read more

"...of the early transmitters sound at once both frightening and fascinating—and the weather they battled against...." Read more

"...At any rate, I enjoyed the book. But not as much as his masterpiece The Devil in the White City and the other books of Larson’s I’ve read." Read more

"...While I thoroughly enjoyed this book, there are two things that would have enhanced Thunderstruck...." Read more

485 customers mention "Story quality"464 positive21 negative

Customers enjoy the book's historical content, finding it an incredibly interesting trip back in time with well-researched details.

"Needlessly added all the gore but overall a fascinating combination of science and intrigue...." Read more

"...As always, Larson makes the history very readable and offers a myriad of interesting facts about the time and people." Read more

"...Some of the most entertaining facts were trivial, such as the origins of the word "taxi" which is simply a shortened version of the word for the..." Read more

"Another intriguing book by Larson. Detailed, colorful, storylines well woven together. I learned many new things. A great history lesson." Read more

359 customers mention "Writing quality"286 positive73 negative

Customers praise the writing quality of the book, noting that the prose is perfect and the author converts history into a narrative in a spellbinding manner.

"...As always, Larson makes the history very readable and offers a myriad of interesting facts about the time and people." Read more

"...As always with Larson, well written, but if you're in this for the true crime stuff..." Read more

"Another intriguing book by Larson. Detailed, colorful, storylines well woven together. I learned many new things. A great history lesson." Read more

"...Overall, Larson has become one of my favorite nonfiction writers and I look forward to each new work he publishes." Read more

228 customers mention "Plot"170 positive58 negative

Customers praise the plot of the book, describing it as a gripping tale of non-fiction with fascinating parallel plots and a concurrent murder situation told in an engaging manner.

"Thunderstruck follows two stories, the first about Marconi and his attempts to expand the use of wireless communication, and the second dealing with..." Read more

"...Once Dr. Crippen meets Ethel, the story become really interesting...." Read more

"...by in this book and I know much more about Marconi and a most interesting murder case than I could not have dreamed of." Read more

"...It's accurate...but it's not the most riveting drama...." Read more

50 customers mention "Character development"37 positive13 negative

Customers appreciate the character development in the book, noting how the author brings them to life and provides insight into their personalities.

"...for holding the reader's interest with an exciting, engaging, character-driven story...." Read more

"...One thing Larson manages to do in this book is make Crippen human...." Read more

"...and places is somewhat interesting but for me with so many characters hard to keep straight , I keep a log of who's who to keep it straight, refer..." Read more

"Erick Larson’s abilities to incorporate historical characters and elements into another page turner!..." Read more

50 customers mention "Educational value"50 positive0 negative

Customers find the book educational, with factual content that compels them to learn.

"THUNDERSTRUCK is a highly entertaining and educational "novel." I call it a novel, because it generally flows with the speed and fluidity of one...." Read more

"...This is a rich, full, well-developed piece of work that reads like a novel...." Read more

"...Larson is a master storyteller. The reader is drawn in from the first introduction. The chase is on! Settle back, and enjoy!" Read more

"...of historical details, the book is also well documented and has a rich reference list...." Read more

44 customers mention "History of wireless technology"34 positive10 negative

Customers appreciate the book's coverage of wireless technology and Marconi's contributions, with one customer noting how it describes the development in real time.

"...Mr. Larson does a great job explaining how Marconi created the wireless, how he tried to improve on the wireless, and how other people also claimed..." Read more

"Enjoyed lead in about Marconi and development of wireless...." Read more

"What does the Titanic and a worldwide man hunt have in common? Wireless technology and both events solidified the inventory as a genius who would..." Read more

"...But the fact of the matter is that the story of Marconi isn't quite as amazing or varied as the story of the World's Fair...." Read more

80 customers mention "Pacing"31 positive49 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book, with some finding it a fast read that accelerates, while others note that the beginning is slow and tedious.

"Good book except in some chapters it dragged and you wanted to get back to the ship a bit too much background information" Read more

"...The book starts out slowly as Larson builds up the backgrounds of Gulielmo Marconi, the father of wireless telegraphy and London's famous murderer,..." Read more

"...This is a well researched story - and it is true - but I think it drags a bit because the story alternates its chapters between inventor Guglielmo..." Read more

"...It is well-written, carefully researched, fast-paced and full of interesting information. I learned a lot, and I was greatly entertained...." Read more

Reviews with images

See all photos

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews. Please reload the page.

Byron
Murderously fact filled
Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2025
Verified Purchase

Needlessly added all the gore but overall a fascinating combination of science and intrigue. A note at the end on how wireless using short waves could have been expanded to bring it up to date with how it works now.

Read more

Helpful

Report
Mary C.
Excitement at the Turn of the Century
Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2025
Verified Purchase
Thunderstruck follows two stories, the first about Marconi and his attempts to expand the use of wireless communication, and the second dealing with a murder. The two stories are tangentially connected. As always, Larson makes the history very readable and offers a myriad of interesting facts about the time and people.

Read more

Helpful

Report
Jonathan Libby
A Testament to the Power of Persistence
Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2010
Verified Purchase
This book took me some time to generate interest in at first due to the historical nature of its text, but once I set myself on the task, I grew compelled more than ever and finished the majority of the book in a fraction of the time that it took to read the first few chapters. I had never thought seriously about where radio, television, and wireless communications originated and am surprised that the history is so colorful.

Marconi unleashed the power of Hertzian waves by applying them in a fashion practical for communication via morse code. He had no knowledge of the waves with regards to their characteristics of travel and wavelengths, but he was able to continue making advances in the distances that he could send his signals. He experimented with each component of his system, from the ether to the mechanics of the transmitter and most prominently to his antannae. He believed that the larger and more powerful his stations, the further the waves could travel. It was a logical conclusion based on his results. However, his critical mistake that took him nearly three decades to discover was that his use of long wavelengths was not necessary and that short waves travelled much further with less power.

I think now about short wave radios like the one that my Dad had set up for awhile in the backyard and I remember my own fascination with the ability to speak with someone on the other side of the world through such a seemingly simple device. Now that I know its origins, I am fascinated by the logic that conspired to its existence. Marconi was so enthusiastic and dedicated to his work that he was able to surpass the scientists and physicists at the time without the knowledge of what was going on with his system. Instead of spending time formulating a theory and answering questions, he pushed on with experiment after experiment until he accomplished what he set out to do.

This feat is a testament to the abilities of a person to accomplish something incredible, something innovative and inventive, without being formally schooled in that area. Simply by playing with the nature of things and using a fresh perspective it is possible to creative a new technology such as this wireless communication system.

Of course, it is worth noting that Marconi himself did not invest the wireless transmitting capability. That was Oliver Lodge, and for the rest of his life that man fought to be recognized as the founder. In addition, there were other key players at the time, including Fleming who was also not recognized despite his planning for the station that first transmitted signals across the Atlantic Ocean from Pordhu to Canada. Marconi was a man set on acquiring the title as the man who created this application, and he succeeded. In his time, wireless telegrams were even referred to as Marconigrams. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics, much to the dismay of Lodge and myriad other competitors, just seven years after the Nobel Prize came into existence.

There are other wonders held in the book, including the details of the interesting life of Dr. Crippen who would become one of the most famous murderers of his time. Having this drama depicted on a timeline parallel to Marconi's allowed for a better illustration of the world at this time. The scenes of London, the talk of war with Germany as inevitable, and the other inventions being released within the same timeframe.

Some of the most entertaining facts were trivial, such as the origins of the word "taxi" which is simply a shortened version of the word for the device developed by a German to automatically calculate of a customer's fare in a cab; the "taximeter." Additionally, I revelled in the foresight that Nicola Tesla posessed in his reference to "television" in 1900 as a capability now that wireless had become so established. Tesla made statements alluding to his own ability to bring this to the world, but was unable to accomplish this feat.

Overall, the book was a testament to the wonders of history. It especially gives insight into the mindset required to invent a new technology that a century later may be used as a common way to control the human environment. I am inspired by what Marconi was able to achieve, and I feel that knowing of his works will serve as subconscious motivation to achieve what is said to be impossible. It's a matter of a passionate pursuit for technological advancement.

Read more

12 people found this helpful

Helpful

Report
Kindle Customer
More damaged than expected
Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2025
Verified Purchase
It wasn't in as good a condition as I expected. It did arrive on time.

Read more

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Report
L. M Young
How Radio Caught the Killer
Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2021
Verified Purchase
In 1910, the North London Cellar Murder was as much as a news event as the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s and the Kennedy assassination in 1963. The difference was that it happened on the cusp of another technological marvel, the birth of wireless communication—and it was wireless communication that finally trapped the alleged murderer.

Dr. Hawley Crippen was an American homeopath who basically sold patent medicines in the US, and later in London. Infatuated with a blowsy young woman named Cora who wished to become a musical performer, he married her. From all accounts he was a gentle, indulgent husband who bought his wife a huge wardrobe, supported her career even though she wasn't that talented, and didn't seem to mind her having a supposedly non-sexual relationship with a fellow male performer, Bruce Miller. Cora later changed her stage name to Belle Ellmore, and it was under that name she disappeared. Crippen initially told everyone that she'd gone home to America to nurse an ailing relative, had gotten sick herself, and died, to cover up the fact, he confessed, that she had run away to the US with Miller. By this time Crippen was being unfaithful with his secretary, Ethel Neave. The police had no reason to doubt his story, until Crippen and Neave left town and someone started poking at the bricks in the cellar.

As in DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY, Larson tells Crippen's story parallel with Guglielmo Marconi's efforts to transmit wireless telegraph signals. Marconi, a driven, spoiled man with an Italian father and Irish mother, had read about Hertz's discovery of electromagnetic waves, and, not really understanding them, pressed on with inventions that transmitted them, and was convinced that these waves could carry telegraph signals "through the ether." At the time transatlantic cables could carry messages from land to land stations, but ships at sea had to rely on passing ships to tell them news or flares to signal distress. Marconi's massive wireless stations, with their blue sparks and thunderclap sounds, would revolutionize communication with ships. But he faced stiff competition with British scientist Oliver Lodge and scientist and magician Nevil Maskelyne, among others, who also had been working on Hertz's "waves," but in a less aggressive fashion, and who considered Marconi a foreign interloper with an unproven system.

As always with Larson, well written, but if you're in this for the true crime stuff (Crippen's was the second most famous British murder case, after Jack the Ripper), the Marconi stuff will bore you, and if you're in it for the science, the Crippen portrayal of a disintegrating marriage will probably make your eyes glaze over. There's also a great deal of Marconi's legal disputes with Lodge, Maskelyne, and even people he's recruited to help him, like Forrest. But there's also a great deal to like in the Marconi parts, especially the portraits of early wireless telegraphy stations—the blue sparks and the crackling of the early transmitters sound at once both frightening and fascinating—and the weather they battled against. Enjoyed, but you must have patience with it.

Read more

16 people found this helpful

Helpful

Report
Kathie
Excellent as always
Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2025
Verified Purchase
Another intriguing book by Larson. Detailed, colorful, storylines well woven together. I learned many new things. A great history lesson.

Read more

Helpful

Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

Charles corkery
Another masterpiece
Reviewed in Australia on February 25, 2021
Verified Purchase

Brilliant recounting of the famous Dr. Crippen murder and the emergence of Marconi and his invention of wireless that occurred at the same time -with both tales finally intertwining dramatically.
Terrific, well researched book, by an author at the top of his game.

Read more
Report
G. Palmer
Different from "The Devil in the White City"
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 26, 2011
Verified Purchase
A fascinating piece of social and technical history, well written and with occasional moments of levity. Erik Larson's repeated the device of interleaving two stories together like his previous book, but it doesn't quite work as cleanly this time round.

There, the 'White City' as a human construct, built to highlight the brightest of men's achievements, serves as an unknowing and unwilling lure to the deadly and dark ensnarement of 'The Devil' - Almost a case of "The brighter the light, the darker the shade"; In this book the tales of Marconi and Crippen are also related in parallel, but in a slightly hazy chronological order sometimes, and the two stories really only touch, make contact, at the end.

It doesn't make it any less satisfying which is why I've given it a 5*, and it's fascinating to read about people's incredulous amazement that any kind of messages could be sent through the ether (given how wireless technology in all its forms is absolutely embedded in our civilisation, just a hundred or so years later).

On a total side-note, years ago I'd read a book about the sinking of the Empress of Ireland, captained by Henry Kendall - It was interesting to get a glimpse into his eventful past and the part he played in the capture of Dr Crippen.

Read more

2 people found this helpful
Report
Rudolf P.
Exzellent recherchiert, spannend
Reviewed in Germany on July 31, 2019
Verified Purchase
Es gibt in diesem Buch 2 Handlungsstränge. Erstens Marconi's Erfindung der drahtlosen Signalübertragung und zweitens eine Lebensbeschreibung von Dr. Crippen, seinem Verbrechen und seiner Flucht.
Gegen Ende des Buchs wird beides zusammengeführt und beschrieben wie Crippens Ergreifung ohne Marconi's Erfindung wohl kaum gelungen wäre.
Wie bei allen bisher von mir gelesenen Büchern des Autors ist auch dieses wirklich exzellent recherchiert und es ist eine Fülle an Details vorhanden.
Sehr empfehlenswert!

Read more
Report
Translate review to English
Tribalat
Passionnant.
Reviewed in France on September 11, 2017
Verified Purchase
Excellent. Très documenté. Erik Larson a l'art de nouer deux intrigues apparemment sans lien. Ici, un fait divers célèbre et une découverte qui a changé la communication (ondes) autour du Dr Crippen et de Marconi. Ce n'est pas un roman mais cela se lit comme un roman.

Read more
Report
Translate review to English
Avenir
Thunderstruck: An Outstanding Read!
Reviewed in Canada on August 4, 2019
Verified Purchase
I have read 'The Devil in the White City', 'Dead Wake', and this work, 'Thunderstruck'. As usual, it is a wondrous representation of fact and brilliant research, beautifully written, with the page-turning excitement of any fiction! Erik Larson blends true stories in the time of the great Marconi and the infamous Crippen into a weave of colourful events, overlapping more and more as time goes on. Magic comes through at the climax, as the story of one deeply influences the other. You must read it!

Read more
Report

See more reviews

Amazon Prime Free Trial

Follow the author

Thunderstruck Paperback – September 25, 2007

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together

More items to explore

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

Videos

Videos for this product

Videos for this product

About the author

Erik Larson

Customer reviews

Review this product

Customers say

Select to learn more

Images in this review

Reviews with images

Pen & Ink Reviews: 4 stars for Larson's Thunderstruck

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews. Please reload the page.

5.0 out of 5 stars Murderously fact filled

4.0 out of 5 stars Excitement at the Turn of the Century

5.0 out of 5 stars A Testament to the Power of Persistence

3.0 out of 5 stars More damaged than expected

4.0 out of 5 stars How Radio Caught the Killer

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent as always

Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars Another masterpiece

5.0 out of 5 stars Different from "The Devil in the White City"

5.0 out of 5 stars Exzellent recherchiert, spannend

5.0 out of 5 stars Passionnant.

5.0 out of 5 stars Thunderstruck: An Outstanding Read!

Murderously fact filled

Excitement at the Turn of the Century

A Testament to the Power of Persistence

More damaged than expected

How Radio Caught the Killer

Excellent as always

Another masterpiece

Different from "The Devil in the White City"

Exzellent recherchiert, spannend

Passionnant.

Thunderstruck: An Outstanding Read!