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203 of 219 found the following review helpful:
 The Best Book I've Read In A Long Time Sep 23, 2008
By R. A. Taylor
"avid reader"
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.
66 of 72 found the following review helpful:
A Masterpiece! Sep 23, 2008
By bobbewig
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!
34 of 37 found the following review helpful:
An Honest and Unhappy Portrayal of Boston and America in 1919 Nov 28, 2008
By Douglas S. Wood
"Vicarious Life"
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.
129 of 164 found the following review helpful:
 An ambitious let-down Sep 23, 2008
By Gregory Baird
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-
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
Lahane Hits a Triple -- Sliding into Third Base Jun 28, 2009
By Anthony Walker
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.
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