Smart, accessible, and highly readable.
How anarchism gave birth to the surveillance state.
The “infernal machine” was Alfred Nobel’s invention, dynamite, a favored tool of those who embraced “the propaganda of the deed” due to its destructive power and easy availability. The anarchists gained notoriety with violent assassinations of heads of state in Europe and the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, believing that only through destruction could a better world be born. Prolific popular historian Johnson begins with an international overview, then focuses on the U.S., where corrupt, inefficient local police forces were ill equipped to deal with any kind of crime. He traces the efforts of Joseph Faurot, a New York City police detective who introduced new methods of identification such as fingerprinting, and Arthur Woods, the NYPD commissioner who modernized and cleaned up the department from 1914 to 1917. Johnson’s protagonists on the other side are anarchists Alexander Berkman, attempted assassin of industrialist Henry Clay Frick and an unabashed proponent of violent political acts, and his partner Emma Goldman, who saw that violence damaged the cause but could not bring herself to disavow comrades who resorted to it. The author is sympathetic to the radicals’ outrage at modern capitalism’s brutality, noting that “for every death at the hand of a bomb-wielding anarchist, a hundred or more would die from factory accidents,” but he deems the anarchists’ association with violence “one of the most disastrous branding strategies in political history.” Woods’ use of data collection to identify the perpetrators of bombings and sometimes even prevent them rehabilitated the NYPD’s tarnished reputation, while random acts that killed civilians turned public opinion against the radicals. Drawing parallels with contemporary acts of terrorism and governmental abuses of power in monitoring citizens, Johnson makes history part of an ongoing story we all need to consider.
Smart, accessible, and highly readable.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593443958
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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