The Cold Millions
2020 • 342 pages
Ratings6
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings6
Average rating3.8
“One of the most captivating novels of the year.” – Washington Post NATIONAL BESTSELLER A Best Book of the Year: Bloomberg | Boston Globe | Chicago Public Library | Chicago Tribune | Esquire | Kirkus | New York Public Library | New York Times Book Review (Historical Fiction) | NPR's Fresh Air | O Magazine | Washington Post | Publishers Weekly | Seattle Times | USA Today A Library Reads Pick | An Indie Next Pick From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins comes another “literary miracle” (NPR)—a propulsive, richly entertaining novel about two brothers swept up in the turbulent class warfare of the early twentieth century. An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams. The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula. Dubious of Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless nineteen-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands. Is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you cannot win the war? Featuring an unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers, The Cold Millions is a tour de force from a “writer who has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors” (Boston Globe).
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Got this from my mom - the verdict from her and one of her book clubs was a hearty thumbs up, and I agree! I will say that she and I are both predisposed to have liked it. The context of the novel is union activism in Spokane in the early 20th century: she's a labor lawyer, and I just relocated from there. Walter is very adept at blending facts about that history and geography with his fiction, and the details (some of which I knew, some of which I didn't) really resonated with my love-hate relationship with the locale (e.g., small details like the names of bars that have been reincarnated in recent years, a building I used to work in makes a cameo appearance, and how strange it is that the courthouse is across the river from other important municipal buildings, big chunks of history like George Wright's evil genocide of Spokane and local Indigenous people and their horses [a road named after him only got renamed in 2020 to honor Whist-alks, a Spokane woman who contributed to the resistance to his violent oppression], and things in between, like how a part of the country that created Taft, the wickedest city in all of America for a few short years before burning up in a literal ball of flames, shaped the region's culture [truly, the history of Taft is a wild ride I recommend]). Anyway! Enough about my feelings about the inland northwest. Walter is quoted in an interview as intentionally using the economic and social strife of this time as a commentary on our own, and to his credit, those echoes are loud and clear without feeling didactic. The threads from multiple narrators were skillfully interwoven, I appreciated that the characters were just people without either pure saints or sinners, and this is the sort of book that I read always feeling driven to know how the story ended.
