BOOKS BOUGHT:

• Stone Arabia—Dana Spiotta
• Kings of Infinite Space—James Hynes
• The Waterfall—Margaret Drabble
• To Live Outside the Law—Leaf Fielding

BOOKS READ:

• Hellhound on His Trail—Hampton Sides
• The Fear Index—Robert Harris
• Next—James Hynes
• The Anti-Romantic Child—Priscilla Gilman

It is August, and as I write, burned-out buildings in London and other British cities are being demolished after several nights of astonishing and disturbing lawlessness. Meanwhile I am in the Dorset village of Burton Bradstock, listening to the sound of the wind-whipped sea smashing onto the shore, and to the young daughter of a friend playing “Chopsticks” over and over and over again on the piano belonging to the cliff-top house we have rented. It’s unlikely that the riots would have made it into these pages at all had it not been for Hellhound on His Trail, Hampton Sides’s book about the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and the hunt for his assassin, James Earl Ray. Just as Tottenham and Hackney, just a couple of miles from my home, were being set alight, I was reading about the same thing happening in Washington, D.C., on the night of April 5, 1968, twenty-four hours after Ray shot King while he was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. There were five hundred fires set in D.C. that night; the pilot who flew Attorney General Ramsey Clark back to the capital from Memphis thought that what he saw beneath him looked like Dresden. And here in Burton Bradstock it became impossible not to compare London in 2011 with D.C. in 1968. It wasn’t an instructive or helpful comparison, of course, because it could only induce nostalgia for a time when arson seemed like the best and only way to articulate a righteous and impotent fury. And while it is true that a violent death sparked our troubles (a black man named Mark Duggan was shot and killed by police), it was not easy to see the outrage in the faces of the delirious white kids helping themselves to electronic goods and grotesquely expensive sneakers. Luckily for us, every single politician, columnist, leader-writer, talk-show host, and letters-page contributor in Britain knows why all this happened, so we should be OK.

Hellhound on His Trail is a gripping, authoritative, and depressing book about a time when, you could argue, it was much easier to talk with confidence about cause and effect. James Earl Ray, King’s assassin, was a big supporter of segregationist George Wallace and his independent push for the White House; Ray also liked the look of Ian Smith’s reviled apartheid...