The Infernal Machine
A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“A fast-burning fuse of a book, every page bursting with revelatory detail.”—ERIK LARSON
A sweeping account of the anarchists who terrorized the streets of New York and the detective duo who transformed policing to meet the threat—a tale of fanaticism, forensic science, and dynamite from the bestselling author of The Ghost Map
Steven Johnson’s engrossing account of the epic struggle between the anarchist movement and the emerging surveillance state stretches around the world and between two centuries—from Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite and the assassination of Czar Alexander II to New York City in the shadow of World War I.
April 1914. The NYPD is still largely the corrupt, low-tech organization of the Tammany Hall era. To the extent the police are stopping crime—as opposed to committing it—their role has been almost entirely defined by physical force: the brawn of the cop on the beat keeping criminals at bay with nightsticks and fists. The solving of crimes is largely outside their purview.
The new commissioner, Arthur Woods, is determined to change that, but he cannot anticipate the maelstrom of violence that will soon test his science-based approach to policing. Within weeks of his tenure, New York City is engulfed in the most concentrated terrorism campaign in the nation’s history: a five-year period of relentless bombings, many of them perpetrated by the anarchist movement led by legendary radicals Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. Coming to Woods’s aide are Inspector Joseph Faurot, a science-first detective who works closely with him in reforming the police force, and Amadeo Polignani, the young Italian undercover detective who infiltrates the notorious Bresci Circle.
Johnson reveals a mostly forgotten period of political conviction, scientific discovery, assassination plots, bombings, undercover operations, and innovative sleuthing. The Infernal Machine is the complex pre-history of our current moment, when decentralized anarchist networks have once again taken to the streets to protest law enforcement abuses, right-wing militia groups have attacked government buildings, and surveillance is almost ubiquitous.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
