Hello book people. PT here. Today I'm
going to be talking about the book
The Given Day by Dennis Lehane. Dennis
Lehane is an author I like a lot. He's
written quite a few books, a lot of
crime novels.
And a lot of books that have been made
into movies, things like Mystic River,
Gone Baby Gone, Shutter Island to name a
few. And the sequel to this book
that i'm talking about today,  The Given Day, the sequel is Live
By Night which just came out
directed by Ben Affleck just this week.
So  his work has been adapted
a lot and he's been very successful and he was
also a writer on The Wire. But
his historical fiction is something that
I hadn't dipped my toes into before now.
So The Given Day is a book that takes
place in the late nineteen tens, like 1917
1918, around there, and it follows two
different men, kinda two parallel
stories. One is the story of a man named
Luther who is a black man who lives in
Ohio and then towards the beginning of
the novel he relocates to Tulsa with his
girlfriend. And his story is basically
he kind of starts doing some criminal
activities in Tulsa and gets quickly in
over his head, and it's his kind
of his story of trying to survive
basically against this very powerful
mob boss. That's the beginning of the
story anyway. The other story is Daniel
who is a a police officer in Boston. He's
kind of a second-generation guy, his dad
is a bigwig in the the police force and
Dan is kind of like an up-and-coming
young police officer. And the struggle in
that one is that basically police
officers are really overworked, they're like the minimum you're allowed
to work is eighty hour weeks but mostly it's a
lot more than that without any overtime.
And they're paid at a level that
doesn't even meet the poverty line, and
any police officers injured,  if you aren't able to work
anymore you don't get any benefits or
anything, you're just done. And so the
idea of starting a union is starting to come
around, but a lot of the older guys and the
politicians and the public in general
kind of thinks of unions at this point
as a very like communists idea and
police men are public servants who shouldn't join unions, that
would be like a big betrayal of their of
their duties.
They're supposed to serve the public not
think about themselves. So his story is
kind of like he's kind of a rising star
and he knows he's going to try and
decide which side of this union thing
he's going to go on. And this is a big
historical novels, it' about 700 pages and really what I set up was just the very
beginning. Like a lot of these historical
novels it's very epic and there's a lot of
twists and turns in both these men's
stories. I thought this novel was great. It was
fascinating.
It was a period of time that I just
really didn't know very much about and hadn't
read very much that took place during
that time. And it's really interesting
that it took place almost exactly a hundred
years ago and a lot of the issues that
are talked about in there are things
that are like back being issues today.
Things like immigration is a big topic
in the book. It's talking about the
Italians and the Germans a little bit
and the Irish especially are really
considered these undesirable groups
that are coming to the United States. A
lot of them are immigrating illegally.
They come to the United States and people feel
like they're not going to assimilate and
so there's a lot around that. As the
story goes on the two stories do
eventually kind of interweave. One
criticism I would have of this book is that
once the stories do interweave I feel
like Dennis Lehane does a little bit
lose interested in the Luther storyFfor
most the book it's like going one
chapter Dan one chapter Luther, and once
the stories converge, he starts focusing a
little more on Dan, and  at that point
is the more interesting story so I was
fine with that, but I do wish
he would have built up that Luther story
a little bit more so that
you could have kept alternating
throughout and they would have been
co-equal protagonists.
Towards the end iI feel like
Dan is definitely clearly the main
character towards the end.
Dennis Lehane though. I really loved his writing
style. It's nothing showy, it's nothing that
is going to win literary awards,
but it has a lot of the hallmarks that I
look for in what I would consider
quality writing. It's clear
and concise and it's not overly wordy,
but the words he does use are very
powerful and he says stuff inalways
a unique way. His dialog's great.
He's got many turns of phrase that
made me smile or sometimes even laugh a
little bit. So that's The Given Day if you
are interested at all in that timeframe,
in historical fiction, in like, Boston's
where the majority of it takes place, so if
you're interested in what city
life was like it that at that time,
definitely check it out. From what
I've heard, it was is mostly historically accurate. There are
a lot of of historical events that are
depicted in here, and there's also Babe
Ruth as a character. He's like
kind of a, they bring him in every once in
awhile and do a chapter from his
perspective. That's pretty interesting too.
the opening the book is actually him.
He's on a train during train stop and
him and his team, the Red Sox, and also
the Chicago Cubs are on the train and they end up
playing against this is a kind of
random team of black guys at this
train stop and Luther's one of those guys.
That's our introduction to him. But
interesting the way that the
book brings in some of those historical
figures.
OK, so that's The Given Day.  I do highly
recommend checking it out. It's been a long
time since i've read a historical
novel, and I really felt like I got a
enveloped into the world. And I highly
recommend it.
Thanks so much for watching. Here is
another video you might like, and please
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watching. I'll talk to you next time. Bye
