Coughlin?” asks the vaguely menacing Justice Department lawyer John Hoover, who is soon to be known as J. “You don’t cotton to radicals, do you, Mr. And he is promised a promotion if he penetrates their ranks.
Deeply swayed by this experience, he is talked into spying on dissidents suspected of spreading radical ideas among Boston’s immigrants. He finds out what it’s like to look up from the basement and see the sky. Danny has followed his father onto the police force but will develop an idea of lawfulness very different from his old man’s.Įarly in the novel Danny is caught in the terrorist bombing of a station house.
The patriarch, Thomas Coughlin, casts a long shadow over all three of his sons, particularly Danny, the headstrong eldest. Lehane, cementing his reputation as the bard of Irish Boston, did not draw them with such insight and intimate familiarity. The Coughlins would be straight out of central casting if Mr.
The book moves to Boston to meet the Coughlins, the lace-curtain Irish family of a proud police captain. Lehane signals the questions of fairness, conscience, fame, power and tactical maneuvering that shape his panoramic story. When Luther walks away from an easy catch and throws the game to avoid an ugly showdown, he creates the highly charged atmosphere in which “The Given Day” will unfold. One particularly gifted black player, Luther Laurence, who will become one of this novel’s central characters, is good enough to get Babe’s goat. The segregated black and white teams get along fine until the blacks start winning. Babe happens onto a group of black players and decides to engage them in some harmless, sporting fun. The train breaks down in Ohio, leaving the white ballplayers with time to kill. The book begins in September 1918 with Ruth on a train, en route from Chicago to Boston in the midst of the World Series. Babe Ruth, who turns up throughout “The Given Day,” is Mr.
0 kommentar(er)
