Customer Reviews

The Given Day

5 star:		(127)
4 star:		(51)
3 star:		(26)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

All readers should have the opportunity to give one book more than the standard five stars. The Given Day would be my choice. The writing in this book is excellent and the research is obviously extensive. I would deem this to be the best book I've read in a long time.
This is the story of Danny Coughlin, a Boston police officer, and Luther Laurence, a black man who is running from some trouble in Tulsa, Oklahoma. These are characters you will come to know and care about a great deal. The story begins in 1918 in Boston, a time of unrest with the end of the First World War and the influenza plague. Police worked long hours for very little pay in terrible conditions. The reaction to Bolsheviks and anarchists, who were labeled terrorists, is relevant to today's world. Dennis Lehane paints a picture of racism, hatred and distrust.
Mr. Lehane has worked historic people, such as Babe Ruth and Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, into the story. The stories about Babe Ruth sparked many interesting conversations as half my family are Boston Red Sox fans and the other half New York Yankee fans. I learned quite a bit of history from reading The Given Day. It is so captivating that I wanted to find corroborating material on the Internet as I was reading. For instance, I had never read about the East St. Louis race riots.
This is a stay up late, can't put down book. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in history.

Once it is known that 'The new Lehane' is in bookstores should be enough to make booklovers rush out to buy a copy. Their money will be well spent, as The Given Day is a work of art. It is much more than just an excellent book, it is fine literature. The Given Day, which takes place primarily in Boston just after WWI, is an epic story of family greed, love, power, hardship, lust, hope and politics. It tells the story of two families -- one white, one black -- swept up in the maelstrom of revolutionaries, anarchists, immigrants, ward bosses, Brahmnins, the Boston police department and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power. As interesting and powerful as the plot is, Lehane's strongest accomplishment is the cast of unforgettable, true-to-life characters he has created. You'll meet beat-cop Danny Coughlin, Boston Police Department royalty and the son of one of the city's most beloved and powerful police captains. Luther Laurence, a black man on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss who works for the Coughlin family. Nora, the Irish immigrant who was taken in by the Coughlins and is the love of Danny's life, as well as many other very credible multidimensional characters. Lehane does such an excellent job in describing these characters that I felt I was right there alongside them feeling all of their joys and sorrows. In addition, Lehane expertly weaves into the story many real-life influential people of the era -- including Babe Ruth, Eugene O'Neill, leftist Jack Reed, NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois, Mitchell Palmer, Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge and an ambitious young justice department lawyer named John Hoover. The Given Day is over 700 pages of reading pleasure and a book that I most highly recommend to you. It is a masterpiece of historical fiction!

The Given Day marks a departure for Lehane. The Given Day is historical fiction that explores the lives of ordinary working stiffs of Boston and the US circa 1919. The story centers around a tough, smart, and handsome Boston Irish copper named Danny Coughlin and Luther Laurence, a gifted black man on the run. Coughlin struggles in his relationship with his powerful father and Boston police captain, Thomas Coughlin. Luther had fled to Boston, but wants nothing more than to return to his wife and child in Tulsa. Their stories eventually come together at the Coughlin household and their mutual interest in the Irish immigrant working girl and family servant.

The characters can be a bit thin at times, their interactions sometimes predictable and maudlin, but Lehane excels in capturing the feel of the town and the times. Labor and ethnic strife boil below the surface. Workers toil in brutal conditions for low pay with no security. The Irish workers who have managed to get one rung up the ladder fear and hate not the bosses, but rather the new Italian immigrants (not to mention the few blacks in town). The political bosses even subject the Boston police rank-and-file to low pay, unsanitary working conditions, and extremely long hours. That summer of 1919 is known today as The Red Summer. In Boston, a potent mix of much-aggrieved workers, bomb-throwing anarchists, and a tyrannical police commissioner erupted in savage street violence during the Boston police strike.

Lehane also sends Coughlin and Laurence each to take a journey of redemption. Coughlin repudiates his role as a spy in the police union and goes on to become its leader. Laurence flees Tulsa and his wife, but is taken in by leaders in the local NAACP whom he repays with courage and loyalty.

Lehane manages to interweave a number of actual historical figures into his story without it feeling contrived. A young John Hoover of the federal Bureau of Investigation is as repellent on Lehane's pages as he was in real life. Calvin Coolidge, then Governor of Massachusetts, comes off as a duplicitous, back-stabber. The much lesser know Edwin Upton Curtis is the disastrously mean-spirited Boston police commissioner who manages to provoke the police strike just when civic and union leaders had reached terms. Perhaps most surprising is Lehane's use of Babe Ruth, who is featured to good effect in several chapters. Early in the book Ruth, then with the Red Sox, and his teammates get into an unlikely pickup game against a team of black players, including Luther Laurence. The game begins as an honest and vigorous athletic contest, but when the blacks start to win, the whites start to cheat and things turn nasty.

Lehane gives us a painfully honest portrayal of the bitter racial, ethnic, and class divisions that marred America in 1919 and he wraps it up in two engaging family stories. The best historical fiction leads the reader to search out the story in more detail and Lehane particularly succeeds with his descriptions of the little known 1917 race riot in East St. Louis (when whites attacked and killed Southern blacks who had come north for work) and the 1919 molasses plant explosion in Boston (which was blamed falsely on anarchists rather than on the lack of maintenance by the plants' owners). See Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, A City in Terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston Police Strike, and Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement.

As a fan of Lehane's Kenzie-Gennaro series, I lament that they appear to be a thing of the past, but Lehane has clearly grown as a writer and that bodes well for the future. Highly recommended.

When it comes to mystery novels, Dennis Lehane is one of the best. In novels like Gone, Baby, Gone (Harper Fiction) (the basis for the film) and Mystic River (also the basis of the movie) Lehane masterfully constructed twisty thrillers both compelling and unnerving, ones that stab deep into the darkest depths of human nature. Then he got bored.

In retrospect, "Mystic River" was Lehane's first departure - from the Kenzie-Gennaro series that he had made his name with, and boy was it a successful venture. Emboldened, Lehane's next work, Shutter Island, delved deeper into the realm of psychological thrillers than his previous novels, but in this reader's opinion that is where he started to slip up. The plot was predictable and the dialogue stilted, portending the bigger mess that was to come.

Five years later, Lehane is unleashing his passion project: a sweeping historical epic set in the harsh life of Boston post-World War I. Every page of this hefty tome screams of ambition and hard work. Just how sprawling is "The Given Day"? The cast of characters is mapped out after the title page to help the reader keep everyone straight.

Don't get me wrong - Lehane is an deft enough writer and a smart enough man to pull this off, and I'm sure that many readers will enjoy this book very much. But darned if it doesn't creak under the weight of all Lehane's lofty ambitions; "The Given Day" suffers from a serious case of too-muchness. He is so eager to cram in as many big historical events as possible that it no longer feels so much like a plot as an excuse to cover as many topics relevant to the era and setting as possible. Racism, crime, immigration, and politics are all small potatoes to the history that Lehane presents in order to define them. To wit: you've got a nation reeling from WWI, a world getting ready for WWII in the not-all-that-distant future, the bombing of the Salutation Street Station, a flu epidemic, a World Series marred by a baseball strike, a police strike, and many more - making it no surprise that the novel weighs in at over 700 pages. And I haven't even mentioned the cameos by real-life people (Babe Ruth! J. Edgar Hoover!). We witness all these events through the eyes of Danny, a policeman, and Luther, a black man on the run from gangsters who eventually finds work in the home of Danny's parents. The plot doesn't progress so much as it bends and twists in order to contrive a way for them to be present at each of these intensely historic moments.

Then there's that stilted dialogue popping up again, this time because Lehane needs his characters to do a great deal of exposition for each big event and to explain how they feel about it. He also uses the dialogue to sprinkle in bits of the research he did, like when one character remarks that "this house leaks like Hudson tires." Conversation doesn't flow naturally - it comes out sounding forced and, at its worst, cheesy.

With all this STUFF going on, the characterization also suffers. With the exception of Danny and Luther alone, everyone on the two-page character list never becomes anything more than a two-dimensional cipher meant to come and go and behave as the plot requires them to at that moment. Unfortunately, Danny and Luther are so bland that even with their extra dimensions they fail to leave any significant impact. And they behave so predictably that it actually becomes trying to continue following their exploits. When Danny goes undercover with radicals and pro-union police officers, one might wonder if he may find himself torn between his high-society family and the plight of the working man, and gee whiz, you'd be right).

Lehane is a gifted writer. I just wish he would go back to doing what he does best. As such, this is not a novel for fans of his previous fiction, or even for serious bibliophiles who will perhaps be unable to forgive the stilted dialogue and plotting. But if you like historical fiction, and especially if you are a fan of Pete Hamill's Forever: A Novel, you will probably enjoy this book.

Otherwise, don't bother.

Grade: C-

The book is a wonderful historical read about what Boston experienced (Lahane also does a terrific job of limning Greenwood, Oklahoma, known at the time as Black Wall Street) in 1918-1919--the Spanish Influenza (the grippe), social unrest (anarchists, Bolsheviks...) and the execrable working conditions of the Boston Police Department. Perhaps drawing on his Irish ancestry, Lahane does a fantastic job giving the Irish characters an Irish flair. Some things seemed a bit contrived, such as Luther popping up in Boston on his uncle's recommendation. Too much of a deus ex machina. Better to have Luther end up in Boston by happenstance.

Lahane's prose, poetry really, is very good (although he drops the F-bomb frequently and randomly). On a technical note, I noticed that he at times used "coat tree" and "tree" when referring to the same thing. And I think he had one black character say both "sir" and "suh" in the same scene without explanation.

The novel falls short of a home run. Novels should be about great storytelling, which involve poignant characters, the type you really want to root for. Although Lahane does a more than adequate job of builing up his characters, it was hard to root for most of them. Danny, one of the protagonists, presents with classic fiction devices--rebels against strong police captain father to take up the union cause on behalf of rank and file police, covets the girl who is betrothed to his brother. Danny's character arc (his change in beliefs) occurs way too soon. He takes up the union cause early in the book, and from there, you pretty much know where he is headed. This gave Danny too much of a pedstrian feel; his character just wasn't big enough to be on the epic scale. Luther, the other protagonist, was more engaging. He found himself involved in criminal activity in Oklahoma and was kicked out of the house by his pregnant wife. Now that hurts. While in Boston, Luther is confronted by the perfidy of Lt. McKenna, who orders Luther to betray the NAACP by stealing and giving him the list of names of Negroes who belong to the NAACP. The problem is that Luther must steal the names from a black couple (NCAAP memebers) who provided him with temporary housing.

Weighing in at a whopping 700 pages, one may feel and see the flab. Many scenes should have been deleted, thereby firming it up. The story is so long that the author felt it necessary to give a dramatis personae so the reader can have an easy reference to remember the cast of characters. The storyline with Babe Ruth felt extraneous.

Overall, a good book.

I've always tried avoiding authors my dad reads just on principle. it always makes me feel like an old man. but after i saw "gone baby gone" a while back, I picked up "a drink after the war" and have loved lehane ever since.

I was a bit skeptical of this book when i first saw it...i am definitely not a big fan of historical fiction, and like someone else said somewhere, I don't like when authors inject real life characters into their work.

But screw that...from page one i was hooked. some reviewers talk about lots of "cookie-cutter" characters. i don't buy it. someone else said "why would i be into boston politics?"

why? because it was really quite fascinating, dudes. i thought the fictional characters were great...and i ended up doing five wikipedia searches on the real life characters just to get some more background knowledge.

and to the reviewer who said lehane drops the "f-bomb" a bit too often...have you even read his previous work? I'm gonna say "no."

Really, what I'm trying to say is this...if you like Lehane's other work like I do, you'll like this one too as long as you keep an open mind and not begin the book by thinking it's gonna be a bunch or boring historical facts made into a story. Trust me. It's damn good.

(Actually four and a half stars.) Dennis Lehane's new novel is an ambitious docudrama of Boston in the period between the first world war and the 1919 police strike. A number of interesting real-life figures are part of the narrative, principally Babe Ruth (who is about to be traded to New York) and such governmental/political figures as J. Edgar Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, Woodrow Wilson, et al. The story concerns the historical events of this period as they impinge upon two principal individuals: a black man from Ohio via Tulsa and an Irish police officer. The events of the period, including the great influenza epidemic and the police strike, are rendered very effectively. The central fictional characters are interesting and engaging and they find themselves at the center of important events in dramatic circumstances. The novel is very long, but it picks up momentum in the second half. Lehane's take on Boston and on the Irish who both afflict and protect it is absolutely pitch perfect and extremely impressive. This is the most 'philosophic' of Lehane's novels, with many trenchant observations and beautiful lines.

Lehane is a very ambidextrous writer, but readers should always be aware that he frequently moves beyond the world of detection and the world of crime fiction and works in other forms and subgenres. The Given Day is crime fiction cum historical fiction and one can already imagine it as a successful miniseries. The characters, however, are not as compelling as those in, e.g., Mystic River and the wider canvas sacrifices depth for breadth. As a meditation on the historical and cultural reality that is Boston it is absolutely superb. I recommend the book highly, but I advise readers that this is a departure for Lehane and will not be for all tastes.

I frequently experience a letdown after reading the choice new releases that publishers and literary critics push and bookstores parade as the greatest novel of the decade. So I was wary but seduced, anyway, to buy Lehane's book--by Boston, by the Red Sox, by themes of racial injustice and social unrest, by the parallels to contemporary issues, and by Lehane's accomplishment with Mystic River.

I was impressed by Lehane's ambitious genre-crossing. The quality of this book is sufficiently steep that the minor flaws are forgivable. This resonant story with memorable, marrow-deep characters did not fade away after the final page.

Amazon provides an exuberant introduction to this novel, so my desire is to share my response to reading it rather than retelling the events. And there are teeming, cataclysmic events that vitalize the story.

Danny Coughlin and Luther Laurence, the two main protagonists, are portrayed with virile consciousness and psychological intensity. I see them, feel them, hear them, smell them-- until I am breathing them. They are nervy and knuckled. They are not merely the broad strokes that you sometimes get in a period piece of sprawling, epic proportions (although there are a few Rocky-esque contours). They are not secondary to advancing the plot. Danny and Luther drive the story as the story also fuels them. And there is enough brio to keep them elastic and passionate. Danny's father, Thomas Coughlin (police captain), is especially interesting. He is a mixture of confident swagger, moral ambiguity, and tragedy--the closest of the characters to a literary one. He is the most unpredictable and enigmatic and keeps you changing your mind about him until the end of the novel.

Although there is some sentimentality to the story and main characters, I did not feel short-changed. Although the author is transparent about his political views, he makes them tactile and combative in detail and luster.

The background and landscape become character, also. It breathes and belches with dust, dirt, steel, mortar, sky, and water. The potent imagery adds dramatic tension and texture to the story without dragging it down. Individuals struggle to harness their environment and reconcile with its impersonal but cruel nature. Lehane intertwines the landscape as extended metaphor and foreshadowing as well as time, place, and temperament. His descriptions give a fierce undercurrent to a subdued atmosphere and tone--there is never just one sustained note (another problem with some period pieces).

Some reviewers cite stilted dialogue with too much exposition. I did not experience that to any significant extent. There were some moments near the beginning of the novel that were a bit awkward, but once the momentum got going and the characters were well-oiled, the story became fluid and powerful. There is a curve in historical fiction where readers adjust to the author's chosen prose style and narrative flow. This is not a perfect novel--some of the architecture of it can strain believability and it waxes sentimental. And yet it is exhilarating, consistently engrossing. It never got musty or flat--it remained plump and invigorating. Its visceral engagement kept it at a 5-star excellence. Like Steinbeck's East of Eden, it is flawed and overflowing and exciting.

This is an intelligent page-turner--also a thriller, a drama, a period piece, and family saga. It is fiery and wet, tempestuous and fierce. And a gift on any given day.

I'm not generally one to pick up sprawling, massive historical sagas, but the period and locale covered by this one was just too interesting for me to ignore. Post-World War I America was a place of massive social and economic turmoil, and Lehane ambitiously sets out to capture as much of this change as possible though his Boston lens. To do so, he invokes two protagonists: Irish-American Boston Police Department officer Danny Coughlin and an African-American named Luther Laurence, who, throughout the course of the book travels from Ohio to Tulsa to Boston. And oh yes, Babe Ruth pops in and out of the narrative at times as a kind of naive Forrest Gumpian voice.

Through Danny's eyes, we see the political and class turmoil that was going on in many of the country's big cities at the time. He starts the book as a well-regarded, but somewhat naive, police officer destined for big things, as befits the eldest son of a politically canny police captain. Over the course of the story, he gets exposed to more and more examples of injustice and gets involved in the police union. This allows Lehane to examine the labor struggles of the day, as well as xenophobic reactions to immigration, fears of internal political terrorism, and government overreactions to all of this -- culminating (and I'm not giving anything away here) in the Boston Police Strike. It's hard not read the message between the lines about post-9/11 American society, and sometimes Lehane is none to subtle in spelling out the parallels.

Meanwhile, Luther gives us the postwar black experience. We meet him initially as a man whose baseball skill equals that of big leaguers but will never get to play professionally due to his race. He loses his factory job when white men come back from the war, but finds some measure of a free society when he relocates to an all-black area of Tulsa with his pregnant girlfriend. There, in Greenwood, he revels in a world where black men can own cars and live vibrant lives, but soon enough he gets swept up in the low life and is forced to hide out in Boston. Once in Boston, he finds work both with the NAACP and with Danny's father, and forms a friendship along the way with Danny. Unfortunately, his past misdeeds start to catch up with him and he has to struggle to avoid their consequences. (If you know your history, you'll know that two years later, Tulsa's black oasis was destroyed by the worst race riot in American history, resulting in the murder of several hundred to several thousand people.)

The book is at its best in conveying specific scenes and spaces: the drab tenement apartments, the smoke-filled back rooms where the powerful ward bosses make plans after huge Sunday meals, the rowdy and raucous nightclubs of Tulsa, the dark and mysterious small bars where plots are hatched and socialism debated, the shabby police stations infested by vermin, and so forth. Lehane does a great job of getting the sights and smells of the time down on the paper, as well as the zeitgeist. Where the book is somewhat less successful is the individual characters and their relationships. Danny's relationships in particular -- with various women, and his two brothers and father is rife with cliche and melodrama. Luther is handled somewhat better, but even his arc of transformation and redemption seems rather forced at times, and his friendship with Danny is way too shmaltzy.

When a book is this long, it really has to bring the goods for me to recommend it, since the time you take to read it is time you could fill with two other books instead. Unfortunately, it's just not quite good enough -- there are plenty of good set pieces, such as the impromptu baseball game between big leaguers and an amateur black team that opens the book, and the rioting in Boston that forms the climax -- but these aren't enough to redeem the clunky characters and Lehane's heavy-handed injection of message throughout. But if you like big historical fiction, or are particularly interested in Boston or labor movements in America, it's probably worth checking out. In a sense, it's probably a best read in combination with some other fiction about the era like E.L. Doctrow's Ragtime, or of the era, like John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy (all of which have their own flaws).

The Given Day is an epic, sprawling novel from best-selling writer Dennis Lehane. This book is a thoroughly enjoyable novel that ambitiously covers 1920s Boston. Yet for its length, it is really a simple story about Danny Coughlin, a policeman's son, Nora O'Shea, a poor imigrant girl, and Luther Lawrence, an African American baseball player.

The novel opens with Danny Coughlin as a Boston police officer. Danny is proud to be a cop and his father is a powerful lieutenant and his brother Connor is a district attorney. Danny wants to be a detective and agrees to go undercover to try and infiltrtate the many anarchist and socialist organizations in Boston. Danny does this to speed up the track to detective, but is somewhat sympathetic to the cause of forming a police union, which really angers his father. Nora is the Coughlin housekeeper. She had a fling with Danny before a secret in Nora's past tore them apart.

Luther Lawrence works in a munitions factory and in his spare time plays baseball with other Afirican Americans. Lehane introduces Lawrence during a pick-up baseball game between his friends and a group of major leaguers (including Babe Ruth) who are stranded because of a broken train. Luther loses his job and takes his pregnant girlfriend Lila to the wealthy Greenwood area of Tulsa, Oklahoma (called "Black Wall Street" before the race riots). Luther gets in to trouble there and ends up fleeing to Boston. In Boston, Luther gets a job with the Coughlin family, and this is where the lives of all the main characters begin to intersect.

The novel takes place around 1919, which was a time of change in America. The country was just coming out of World War 1. The economy was struggling to cope with the demands of an industrialized nation. Unions such as the American Federation of Labor were organizing to fight for the overworked, underpaid working class. This was a time when unions existed to actually help workers and not just to get politicians elected or coerce members. The Boston police made poverty level wages and often work several weeks without a day off. Their precincts were rat infested and dirty. Danny Coughlin is a natural leader and leads the Boston police into the battle for higher wages and better working conditions. Will Danny be successful? Will Danny's past indescretions come back to haunt him? Will Danny's friendship with Luther Lawrence do more harm than good?

The Given Day is a long novel but easy to follow. Lehane fans should know, this is not a suspense novel like his Kenzie/Genarro series. It is most like Mystic River, yet there is no supsense. This is a straight, literary fiction novel. The pages turn quickly and it is a fast read, even for its length. I enjoyed the book for its informative, and at times entertaining look at historical Boston.

The story didn't reach out and grab me, didn't force me to care about the characters. Fans of Lehane should enjoy The Given Day in spite of its weaknesses.