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THE INFERNAL MACHINE

A TRUE STORY OF DYNAMITE, TERROR, AND THE RISE OF THE MODERN DETECTIVE

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

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

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 Yorker staff 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

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THE MESSAGE

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Bearing witness to oppression.

Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024

ISBN: 9780593230381

Page Count: 176

Publisher: One World/Random House

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

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