i am starting steven johnson's the infernal machine tomorrow. kind of excited. i have read ghost map by him before, which is about the london cholera outbreak. he's a good writer.
this book was rather delightful. it details the trials and tribulations faced by cops and anarchists in the early 1900's. mostly through the eyes of emma goldman and her homie alexander berkman. their shared love of the working class is solid and movements in the anarchist underground and how their cells tried to use dynamite against rockefeller after the mine bullshit in colorado popped off (neat how it tied into the other book). but there is also mention of the extortionist mafia precursor "the black hand" and how they would be all like "give us money or we'll dynamite you"
kinda tempted to see if i can find a book or two on the various groups that have used that name. i know there's more.
as someone who finds forensics and its use and mis-use fascinating, it was neat hearing about the earliest nypd use of fingerprinting in a trial.
author goes into detail saying once dynamite arrived the nypd actually had to start getting their shit together because they were basically organized crime themselves and cops making 5k salaries would retire with 6 figures n mansions from being paid off repeatedly by red light district
author, after talking about berkman's attempt to kill a strikebreaking pinkerton-hiring ceo, also details how many people were just... routinely getting fucking maimed. in places around philly there would be at least 500 factory maimings/killings/cripplings etc a year. and it was just the cost of doing business. but one ceo gets shot n the media n cops gotta start getting their shit straight. (absolutely no parallels can/should be made to anything recent going on in the last month)
it was nice hearing about papa kropotkin's travels and his living with swiss clockmaker commune and such.
eventually j edgar hoover deported goldman and berkman and even papa kropotkin went to soviet union before them. the next part depressed me n reminded me that while the existence of the soviet union was good for the working class outside of their sphere, lenin was still a fag. papa kropotkin went to cute little commune town to live with anarchists and soviets came in n were like "what is this, an already existing commune? without our permission?" and re-located half the people living there and kropotkin and his family were living on stores of what they had through winter. he made it through winter but 2 years later when he passed goldman wrote to lenin and was like "would you mind letting some of the anarchists out of jail so we can mourn him in peace?" and he was like "lol what anarchists?"
after that, i listened to call of the wild and white fang. both were nice but i prefer call of the wild more.
after those, at the suggestion of chuj, i dl'ed the man who was thursday by gk chesterton
this was an interesting book with a couple of different ways of interpreting it and it's old so i don't care about giving spoilers but if you don't want any scroll to the next paragraph. when worms reveals his card i was like "everyone else in the group has a card n sunday was in the dark room callin' it now" so i was not surprised by anything else until the surrealist and very open to interpretation turn in the final two chapters of the book. the different philosophers, faking being anarchists while actually being cops but sworn to secrecy so they feel obligated not to tell the cops, being led by the same father figure into both groups... there's a lot of ways to interpret this book.
and lastly, listened to a generic "cryptids of the u.s." mini encyclopedia that i finished today. i tend to agree with the author that bigfoot is everywhere and "an invasive species" like, every state has its own bigfoot p much n it goes by different names n overshadows other, more interesting local ones like why focus on bigfoot in new orleans when you got the rougarou (cajun werewolf)? the book ended with the jackalope
b-based
