Slam Bam Wow! In what is a complete turnabout from the previous book, A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite reads like its title. This is the story of a violent and disgruntled man with nothing to lose. He hatches a plan to extort a casino in Lake Tahoe, one to which he owes a fair amount of money, by planting an enormous bomb and demanding 2 million dollars to disable it. It's a true story that plays out like an insanely well-paced action movie.
You can get a short, very unsatisfying, summary from Wikipedia, but you're better off picking up the book. Well, it's not really a book -- it's an Amazon Single -- short works that are too long to be considered longform journalism, but too short for a book. In this case it's about 70 pages for $2.99. That's a couple hours of fine entertainment for less than a latte.
It's a fascinating story just to see how the plot proceeds, how it falls apart, and how the bad guys are finally caught. Very well done. The prose a blunt and occasionally ungraceful, but that's like complaining about a lack of witty repartee in an Expendables film. After slogging through the Javier Marias book above, I was refreshed by the straightforward way it held me rapt without presuming on my time and attention.
Should you read A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite? Yes, for sure. Read it now and you'll get to say "Oh yeah, I read the book" when it comes out in a year or two starring Bradley Cooper.
Aside: The bombing occurred in August of 1980, and it was certainly all over the news outlets at the time, yet I had no recollection of it until I stumbled across this. I would have been a month shy of my 20th birthday and at the end of what was certainly a lazy summer in Ann Arbor after my sophomore year, getting ready to move into my new digs across the street from Zingerman's Deli. I must have been completely detached from any external reality.
