A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite

True crime

Print length: 71 pagesThe Atavist, 2014

Description

In 1980, gambler and businessman John Birges turned a grudge against Harvey’s Resort Hotel at Lake Tahoe into an extraordinary extortion scheme. He and his accomplices rolled a machine containing roughly half a ton of dynamite into the casino and demanded millions of dollars, claiming that any attempt to move or disarm it would trigger an explosion. As hotel guests and employees evacuated, local authorities and the FBI confronted a device whose elaborate switches, compartments, and warnings made every intervention perilous. Adam Higginbotham reconstructs the plot from its planning through the tense effort to neutralize the bomb and identify those responsible. The account combines true crime with a study of improvised engineering, institutional uncertainty, and the destructive reach of one man’s obsession.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Direct · Journalistic · Technical

Pace

Fast

Tone

Cerebral · Suspenseful · Tense

Structure

Chronological nonfiction

Focus

Ideas · Information · Plot

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

Crime and punishmentObsessionSurvivalTechnology and society

About Adam Higginbotham

Adam Higginbotham is a British journalist whose narrative nonfiction reconstructs technological disasters and elaborate crimes through documentary research, firsthand testimony, and close attention to institutional decisions. A former editor-in-chief of The Face and a contributor to The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times, he brings the directness of magazine reporting to densely assembled accounts. Midnight in Chernobyl moves among witnesses, technical failure, and Soviet efforts to conceal the catastrophe. A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite follows both the construction of a casino bomb and the authorities’ uncertain attempts to neutralize it. Higginbotham builds tension through accumulating operational detail while keeping individual actors within wider systems of power and responsibility.

Midnight in Chernobyl Apple Books

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: The Atavist
Language: English

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