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Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, The City's Courageous Recovery, And The Epic Hunt For Justice (2014)

by Scott Helman(Favorite Author)

4.17 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0525954481 (ISBN13: 9780525954484)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Dutton Adult

review 1: It’s incredibly hard to write this review, just as this is an incredibly hard book to read. Neither my off-the-mark review nor the difficulty of this book should keep you away, though. Why is it so difficult to write? After all, it’s not an unfamiliar subject. It’s not something I don’t know enough about, especially after reading. Yet, it’s something I haven’t felt as much as so many others.Of course, tragedies like 2013’s Boston Marathon bombing touch everyone in the nation. We all feel it, to some degree. The degree I felt it may have been little – I didn’t know a single person from Boston ((this has changed since the bombing)), I’ve never been to city, before 2014, I’d hardly even heard of Copley Square.What I do know a little bit about is running,... more even running a marathon. Granted, I’ve only ran one, not in Boston, but in Minnesota, but it was enough to understand just how much goes into Marathon Day. You train for months, maybe even a year. You test your muscles, push them to the extremes, reach their limits. You plan weeks ahead how to handle Marathon Day, where you’ll stay the night before, what to eat the morning of, how much you should run the day before, where you can expect your family to be standing. Even for the spectators the day of the marathon is a big deal: lawn chairs are set up, oranges, watermelons, water bottles, candies are bought to be passed out to the runners trooping by. Signs are painted, plans are made.I don’t know if it’s true for everyone, but for me, there were points after the 20 mile mark where I hit that wall, thinking “I just need to stop here,” and realizing, I can’t. There’s a point in the race where you just can’t not get to the end. Your family’s waiting there. Your bags waiting there – cell phone included. Sure, you could stop on the road, but to get home, you need to cross that finish line.I can’t imagine what it would feel like to hear you’re not even allowed to get to the end because a bomb has gone off.It’s been a year, and still, the wounds feel so fresh. After all, victims of the bombings are still in rehabilitation, still mourning lost loved ones or lost limbs, still getting their lives back to normal, or at least to a new normal.I’d have to say, for how fresh the wounds are, Long Mile Home is an amazingly balanced read. Written by two Boston Globe reporters, authors Jenna Russell and Scott Helman keep a remarkable cool under the subject of their book.Memories of lost ones are apt memorials – recognizing the people for who they were, never resorting to martyring or putting people on undeserved pedestals. Stories from survivors (including Heather Abbott, a woman forced to make the decision whether or not to keep her foot and lower leg, and if not, just how much to let go) and those at the scene (race director Dave McGillivray; surgeon David King, who went straight from finishing the marathon in 3:12:00(ish) to saving lives in the hospital trauma center) are told firsthand, free from hyperbole and exaggerated emotions.What I appreciated the most – the way authors handled the fact that the bombings were classified as an act of terrorism. Hisham Aidi talked very well about the way, just after the bombings before suspects were revealed and perpetrators were caught, Muslims around the country hoped in the deepest parts of their hearts that the bombers would be some WASP Americans, people tortured by mental illness or the like, rather than an Islmaic extremist acting on their own in last month’s Rebel Music – no true Muslims supported these actions, and they didn’t want the slow-forming scabs of 9/11 to be picked off by an incident like this.Of course, as we know now, the bombers did unfortunately believe their actions were part of a larger religious cause, they were darker-skinned and had funny, foreign-sounding names, just pulling back the same feelings of hatred from a decade earlier. I truly, truly appreciated the way the authors cast the bombers a OUTSIDERS, boys with little to no connection to the actual religion of Islam, boys in troubled cycles of behavior. They even go on to point out the injustice done once the first videotapes of the brothers were released and internet witch hunts began, vigilantes naming innocents as the causer of the crime.I don’t know how much more to say – you know the story, although not as well as you will after reading the book. It’s as fair and balanced as Fox News claims to be. It’s an incredibly hard read, mainly to stomach the whole story and all its details. I guess my best advice is to read it slowly, absorb as much as you can, and just pray for healing for the city.
review 2: Overall, I thought this was an interesting and largely thoughtful read based on the experiences and research of these two Globe reporters. It accurately captured so much of what that period was like for Boston and Bostonians in many ways. It had moments of bordering on sensationalism, but overall it didn't strike me in that vein. I was disappointed to see almost no mention of the Copley Square area faith communities, even in passing. They were a huge part of the outpouring of response in the immediate aftermath and the year following. In the case of Old South Church, they were also deeply impacted. less

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