The Infernal Machine

Starred review from April 29, 2024
Bomb-hurling anarchists square off against cops and their newfangled scientific sleuthing in this action-packed history. Bestseller Johnson (Enemy of All Mankind) surveys the American anarchist movement of the 1880s through the 1920s, which launched dozens of terrorist attacks. At the center of the narrative are Russian-Jewish immigrant radicals Alexander Berkman, who shot and stabbed steel magnate Henry Clay Frick in a failed 1892 assassination attempt, and Emma Goldman, Berkman’s sometime lover. Full of rousing speeches, feverish conspiracies, and tearful leave-takings, their soap opera–like story gives the book a romantic sheen. Johnson also explores innovations wrought by dynamite, which enabled New York to build subways and skyscrapers, but also furnished anarchists—and organized criminals—with cheap and easily hidden bombs. The book’s third strand recounts how the NYPD battled bombers with new techniques, including fingerprint identification, a bomb squad, and undercover investigations, one of which foiled a plot to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Johnson’s entertaining true crime picaresque coalesces around the resonant irony of anarchists who dreamed of a stateless society getting crushed by an ever more powerful surveillance state, embodied by the investigative filing system that future FBI director J. Edgar Hoover deployed to build a successful case to deport Berkman and Goldman in 1919. The result is a captivating saga of vehement political passions quelled by cold technocracy.

May 1, 2024
Anarchism, bombs, and fingerprints collide in popular-science writer Johnson's (Extra Life, 2021) latest illumination of overlooked connections and consequences. Alfred Nobel perfected dynamite to propel engineering marvels only to see it used in bombs to maim and kill, prompting him to establish the Nobel Peace Prize. Russian geographer and anarchist Peter Kropotkin envisioned a society of worker cooperatives; instead, followers of his disciples, the radical activists and writers Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, committed assassinations and bombings to fight for the rights of workers suffering "monstrously unjust" capitalism and the physical brutality of American industrialization. As terrorist attacks multiplied in New York City, forensic crime-fighting evolved, propelled by innovative detective Joseph Faurot and reformer turned police commissioner Arthur Hale Woods. Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, a former clerk at the Library of Congress, J. Edgar Hoover, was recruited for the first national crime bureau, where he weaponized library science as the foundation for advanced surveillance. Goldman is a particularly compelling figure and Johnson surrounds her with profiles of other women anarchists. Johnson's vivid, eye-opening history chronicles epic labor-movement battles, terrorist bombings failed and tragic, backlash against immigrants, love affairs, undercover operations, courtroom dramas, and prison life in a fast-paced narrative, rich in cinematic moments and resonance.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2024
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.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.