Riots, Anarchists, and Babe Ruth

Denis LeHane's historical novel The Given Day covers a period of history I knew next-to-nothing about: the Boston police strike of 1919 . . . and he weaves in tales of race and baseball (Babe Ruth is a character!) and unions and anarchists and nationalism and radical political rhetoric, and there is also the backdrop of the Spanish influenza; it's a page turner written in his typical hard-boiled vivid style, but it's all hung on a framework of history that I had never been taught . . . the conflict of workers and the burgeoning unions versus the nationalistic anti-Bolshevik stance of the upper class; things get quite wild and it all ends with the impending Volstead Act and Prohibition . . . but there's a great scene in the days before the act is to go into effect, when everyone is drinking like mad, celebrating the end of a decade and the beginning of the Roaring Twenties-- this coincides when Babe Ruth is traded to the Yankees and the soldiers have returned from WWI . . . LeHane depicts a wild and literally explosive moment in history, with some entertaining characters to boot.