****
WTR (What’s Toby Reading)? provides unsolicited and unsponsored (I don’t get paid) opinions of books I have recently finished.
*****
There may be no better mental exercise for adults than doing research based on a book you’re reading. Joshua Melville’s American Time Bomb: Attica, Sam Melville, and a Son’s Search for Answers had me reading, researching, and repeating – and again – and again.
If you’d like to hear author Joshua Melville and I speak about the book, we do so here:
Whether or not you’d ever heard of Sam “Mad Bomber” Melville’s 1969 bombing of iconic New York City buildings, you will immediately admire the length Joshua Melville (Sam’s estranged son) has gone to piece to together his mission, life, and death.
American Time Bomb is, at heart, a father-son story – ranging from harsh, to vulgar, to sweet and endearing, to reflective. By the book’s conclusion, Joshua Melville both admires his father’s commitment to a cause while lamenting that such a mission forced him to abandon his own son and family.
There is something for everyone in the book – for dads, moms, people that might have been around in the 1960’s, for sons and daughters looking to fill in the blanks from a parent lost prematurely.
I enjoyed Joshua Melville’s perspective, diligence in un-digging the truth about his father, and the book’s ability to compel me to learn about an era that I might have otherwise avoided.
Book Details:
