Customer Reviews

Streets of Fire

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"Let righteousness flow like a mighty river, and justice roll down like an everlasting stream..." Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights marches in Birmingham with those Biblical words. In Thomas Cook's novel, Streets of Fire, we find the city of Birmingham as it was during those days, a city parched and thirsting for righteousness and justice. The novel gives a fascinating and stirring portrait of the city in those tense and exciting days. But as "all politics is local" so, Ben Wellman finds, justice resides first in the individual geography of the heart. Wellman, a police officer, World War II veteran and loner, takes refuge from the political turmoil of the marches by investing himself deeply to solve a single, vicious crime. A little girl from the city's Bearmatch neighborhood is found buried in an arid ballfield. His absorption in this single crime leads him--and those around him--to confront deeper patterns of bigotry, exploitation, and political manipulation in others, and in themselves. The plot is complex, but satisfying and dramatic in its conclusion. Cook's writing, in this as in later novels, offers many beauties, as well as a quality of serious, plain good prose. In this novel, the idea that overarches the plot development is that of water, or drought. Cook reflects the distortions of an unjust way of life in an arid ballfield, a filthy, dried-out storm drain that holds a man's murdered body, a leaking roof, the torrent of water from the city's fire hoses, the tide of emotion rising within Wellman, which will carry him forward into a new life. If the novel has a fault, it's that the several minor characters around Wellman in the Birmingham police department are not well distinguished one from another. Since plot development hinges on several of these characters, their vague outlines sometimes make it difficult for the reader to figure out who is doing what to whom. This novel takes the reader back to a cleaner time in the national memory--a time when great evil was certainly done, but also a time when simple decency seemed the best way to respond. Cook's main character is the sort of man who says little, but doggedly does much, by simply being considerate of others, firm in his allegiance to human dignity, passionate in his defense of innocence. For Wellman, "race relations" are just human relations. He insists on treating them that way. He distinguishes only between vicious and virtuous behavior, awarding contempt to the first and honor to the second evenhandedly. The complexities and evasions and institutionalized resentment and restitution that mar race relations in our time are not part of this novel. It takes us back to a simpler time, when we hoped we could all be judged by the content of our character. It was a great pleasure--a deep satisfaction in fact--to be reminded once again how men of my father's generation addressed these evils: by just behaving with impeccable decency.

I HAVE JUST FINISHED THIS COULDN'T PUT DOWN BOOK. I THOUGHT THE BOOK WAS EXCELLENT! IT WAS WELL WRITTEN, HISTORICAL, THOUGHT-PROVOKING, AND A BOOK I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE ON MY SHELVES TO SAVE FOR MY CHILDREN TO READ SO THEY CAN UNDERSTAND THE HORROR AND HISTORY OF THAT PERIOD. THIS BOOK IS ONE I HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

Streets of Fire is historical fiction. It tells the heart break of a South that needs to change. I enjoyed the fact that the book was from both ends of the debate. The mystery almost takes a backseat to the racial fights going on in the book. But it is still a great mystery.