She concludes:
The searing precision with which the book describes this devastation is one of its great strengths. (“Blackened storefronts. Overturned carts and overturned cars, all burnt. Two halves of one skirt in the gutter, wet and covered in soot.”) But that quiet horror, reminiscent as it is of the best of “Mystic River,” is by no means this book’s sole source of strength. “The Given Day” is a huge, impassioned, intensively researched book that brings history alive by grounding the present in the lessons of the past. When Mr. Lehane writes of “a man who wore his power like a white suit on a coal black night,” he could be writing about a distant time — or writing about his own.
Read the entire review here and get your copy of the book on Tuesday!
