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Title: Two books entangled....
Review: The problem with "Big Trouble" is it tries to be two books at once. The first is a chronicle of the murder of the governor of Idaho and it's aftermath. The second is an general history of the U.S. during the latter 19th Century.If you could separate the two, say 2-300 pages on the murder and trials, and 500 pages divided into chapters on all the various subjects the author thought worthy of research, it would be both a good read and a useful reference.But the way it's presented, with the narrative constantly interrupted by discourses only tangentially related to the story itself, it is neither.I do appreciate the tangential material, but not the way it's presented. The narrative becomes increasingly difficult to follow when the events of a single week may be interrupted with accounts of something that happened in 1892, and then another in 1866, then a page later on to a new tangent....
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