truepenny | UBC: Hampton Sides, Hellhound on his Trail

Hellhound on His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt in American History by Hampton Sides

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The thing I particularly admire about this book (beside the fact that it is both well-written and well-researched, proving that the two things can coexist in the same work), is the way that Sides follows so many different paths, both as they twist together toward the assassination and as they unravel in a dozen different directions after. The underlying backbone of the book is James Earl Ray's trajectory, but Sides also follows Martin Luther King, Jr.--both as a man and (horribly but necessarily) as a corpse--the inner circle of the SCLC's leadership and the dreadful collapse of the Poor People's Campaign (fifty years later and we still need Dr. King back--there has been no one like him, either before or since); Coretta Scott King; the garbagemen's strike in Memphis; the FBI, including their patient backtracking of every damn piece of Ray's matériel . . . Sides' prose is beautifully lucid and he approaches each of his subjects with the same patience, attention, and empathy. (Empathy. Not the same as sympathy. He has no sympathy for Ray at all, but he does his best to have empathy for him, even as that project becomes more and more self-evidently hopeless.)

Sides objects, in the afterword to the paperback edition, to his book being called a thriller--"it implies," he says, "that I've turned a national tragedy into an entertainment of sorts." The book is entertaining to read--in the sense that it keeps you engaged and actively interested--but it is not an "entertainment." What makes it compelling is the way Sides lays all the pieces of the assassination out, like the gears of a clock on a piece of black velvet, and patiently, one by one, explains how they worked. It's painfully compelling, both as historiography and as a lament for everything that Ray destroyed.

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