The Infernal Machine: A True Story Of Dynamite, Terror, And The Rise Of The Modern Detective , Johnson - B

          Anarchy as a 19th century political concept was the principle that no rulers, or ruling class, were necessary in an equitable society.  Anarchists believed people should work in small cooperative efforts, similar to the guild system that dominated Germany for centuries, without industrial sized, top down structures. The discovery of dynamite gave the anarchists the tool they needed to smash the state. The state response to anarchy was the birth of forensic science, and the fight to end the epidemic of violence. 

         Prior to 1866, when Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, all man made explosions were initiated by gunpowder. Nobel harnessed the raw power of nitroglycerin in a stable compound with porous silicate and called it Nobel's Safety Powder. The world called it dynamite. Its primary use was in blasting for construction projects. "Almost all of the iconic engineering triumphs of the period - the London Underground, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Panama Canal - relied extensively on the new explosive." 

          Innumerable attempts, including a few close calls, were made on the life of Alexander II. A dynamite attack at the Winter Palace killed dozens of staff, but not the czar.  The New York Times referred to the assassins as "nihilists," and they finally succeeded in killing the czar in March, 1881. They used nitroglycerin.  This led to an international explosion of nitro and dynamite usage against establishment figures around the world. Dynamite was more stable than nitro and thus, more popular.

         Two Russian Jews left the Pale of Settlement , emigrated to New York and became partners in anarchy, fast friends and occasional lovers. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman wished to take action in America, and chose Henry Frick of Carnegie Steel as their target. With financing help from Goldman, Beckman went to Pittsburgh and twice shot the executive in his office. Frick lived, and Berkman went to prison.

         In Europe, anarchists struck so frequently with bombs and guns that European countries met to discuss and coordinate their actions and eventually create Interpol.  In Paris, Alexandre Bertillon was pioneering methods to identify criminals. He took photographs, measured various body parts, and cross-cataloged everything in such a way that an arrest in France could be researched in the records and the criminal  identified. 

         In September of 1901 in Buffalo, NY, an American born anarchist shot President McKinley twice. He died eight days later. An immediate nationwide search for Goldman, who the assassin said inspired him, began. Goldman was arrested in Chicago, but was soon released as she had no connection to the crime. The new president encouraged, and a year later Congress approved, an Anarchist Exclusion Act. A few years later, the NYPD began a primitive fingerprinting section under the direction of Joseph Fleurot. A new Detective Bureau soon followed. Fleurot successfully put a man in jail based exclusively on his fingerprints. The new scientific approach to fighting crime drew national attention, and was part of the background to the development of the Bureau of Information's card cataloging system. 

       The 1914 Ludlow massacre that caused the death of eleven children at the hands of the Rockefeller's drove the anarchists into a frenzy of activity. They tried to block access to Pocantico Hills, but were arrested by the local police. As the outrage in the anarchist community grew, the NYPD created a Bomb and Anarchist squad and began to dramatically increase its understanding of the manufacture of the infernal machines. More and more attempts were made to bomb buildings in NYC.  The police were able to stop an attempt at St. Patrick's Cathedral at the last minute, but failed to prevent a bombing of their own building on Centre Street. The outbreak of WWI led to increased bombings by the anarchists, and the largest explosion in NYC prior to September 11th occurred at a depot in NY harbor and was set by German saboteurs.

        "On June 14, 1917, Congress passed The Espionage Act, perhaps the most sweeping implementation of state-mandated patriotism ever produced by the United States government." Because of their well-known opposition to the war and the draft, Goldman and Berkman were arrested the day the law passed, tried, and convicted after a jury deliberated for 39 minutes. In the spring of 1919, a NYC postal inspector identified dozens of bombs mailed to important people around the country and was able to safely remove them. One, however, exploded at the door of the home of the US Attorney General. The DOJ created a Radical Division, and put a young J. Edgar Hoover in charge. Hoover led the charge to deport Goldman and Berkman, and was at Ellis island on  December 21, 1919, when the two anarchists were among 249 people sent back to Russia. The two were so disillusioned that they left Russia two years later. With the exception of a speaking tour to the US in the 1930's when Goldman was allowed to return, they both spent the rest of their lives in exile in Europe.

          One last big explosion on Wall Street in 1920 was the  end of the movement in the US. "The guild system did not prosper as a blueprint for social organization in the twentieth century. But terrorism did." This is an intriguing book with a significant amount of interesting information. I believe it misses being really good because it lacks consistency.

The Winner, Baldacci - C, Inc.

             "Mr. Jackson" is a criminal mastermind with a vast set of skills. He has cracked the US's national lottery, and selects down and out people to be winners. He manages and controls the money after the announcement of the winner, pays his people a huge return and gives them unlimited control of the principal after a decade. It's a win-win. LuAnn Tyler of nowheresville Georgia proves a bit more complicated because her wastrel of a boyfriend is in the drug business and is killed the day LuAnn leaves him. The locals want her for murder. After winning, LuAnn and her infant daughter, Lisa, leave the country. A decade later, and against the direct admonition of Jackson, she, Lisa, and Charlie, once Jackson's man and now LuAnn's general factotum, secretly return to America. She meets Matt Riggs, a terribly skilled carpenter/GC working on her house, but actually a former FBI man in the witness protection system.

           Most of my Inc.'s are long, tedious history books, infrequently novels, particularly ones written by a noted page-turner. At the half-way point, I jumped ahead to find an enraged Jackson has kidnapped Lisa, the FBI is on LuAnn's tail, and Charlie has been nearly killed by Jackson. LuAnn and Riggs get the jump on Jackson, and Riggs shoots him. The FBI drops all charges against LuAnn after the IRS cleans her out for non-payment of taxes. Riggs proposes and provides some ideas on how they can all get by. LuAnn smiles and points out that she has $100M in a Swiss bank. Total balderdash!

Left For Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World, Dolin - B

               Charles Barnard, veteran mariner and sealer working for the NY firm of Murray and Sons, set sail on April 12, 1812 on the brig Nanina for the Falklands, which they reached  five months later.  The crew set to work killing and skinning as many seals as possible. In early 1813, they learned that the US and Great Britain were at war. Unbeknownst to the Americans, the HMS Isabella, sailing from Australia to England, had faltered nearby, and the crew and passengers were stranded. Six Britons set sail in a longboat and reached Buenos Aires, 1200 miles to the northwest, Soon a brig, the HMS Nancy, was dispatched to rescue the castaways. Meanwhile, the Americans and British had met and agreed that the Nanina would take the Britons to the mainland, in exchange for the goods on the Isabella.

             Upon arrival in the Falklands, the Nancy's captain, William D'Arandra, viewed the Americans as enemies and not saviors, refuted the agreement, took the Nanina as a prize, and declared all of the Americans to be prisoners of war. He directed the Nanina to sail to London and he took the Nancy to Buenos Aires. The Nanina was so overcrowded that the prize master decided to sail to Buenos Aires as well. The US consul negotiated freedom for the Americans, and was almost able to recover the ship, but it sailed for London.

           D'Arandra had left five men, including Capt. Barnard, on the Falklands without explanation or remorse. After two years, they were rescued by a British whaler. A few months later after the whaler sailed to the Pacific, the men went ashore in Peru. Barnard boarded an America ship which sailed to Hawaii and China, where he boarded another ship that took him home, four and a half years after he had departed.

          The prize court in London awarded the Nanina to D'Arandra, but Murray and Sons appealed the decision as soon as the war ended. In 1818, the Admiralty reversed itself and ruled in the Americans favor.

          Most of the principals in this story quickly faded from view. In 1829, Barnard published memoir of his story with a second edition following a decade later. There is a small museum named after him the Falklands. 

Deal Breaker, Coben - B

                This is a three decade old debut novel featuring sports agent, Myron Bolitar.  Myron played basketball at Duke and for the Celtics before an injury sent him to Harvard Law School. He realizes someone is trying to blackmail his client, Christian Steele, the number one pick in the NFL draft and the franchise QB everyone wants. The issue is his former girlfriend, Kathy Culver, a beautiful, perfect sorority sister who disappeared eighteen months ago. Kathy's sister, Jessica, also a former girlfriend comes to Myron convinced that her sister's disappearance and her father's recent murder are connected. Myron digs through massive amounts of sleaze, lies, infidelities, and violence on the way to figuring out that it was his All-American client behind it all.

Refiner's Fire, Leon - B

                  Guido and Claudia investigate the troubling actions of 'baby gangs,' teens running rampant in Venice. While looking into one boy in particular, they focus on his indifferent dad, who was a hero during Italy's deployment in Iraq. As it turns out, he was far from a heroic soldier, but rather was the organizer of antiquities theft. When rival gangs meet, he shows up and saves a boy from a fire. Weak tea that leads to the question is the end near for this special, but aging author.

The Great River: The Making & Unmaking of the Mississippi, Upholt - B

                "The Mississippi River drains more than a million square miles, an expanse that encompasses forty percent of the continental United States: all of seven states,  parts of another twenty-five, and a small scratch of two Canadian provinces." This is a story of The Great River, as it once was, and all of the engineering efforts that the US Corps of Engineers has used to tame it.

                   Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to travel the river in 1541. Two Frenchmen, Marquette and Joliet, arrived a century and a quarter later. La Salle was the first to descend the river to the gulf. Explorers, trappers, missionaries, and farmers followed. When France sold the Louisiana Territory to America in 1803, the entire watershed became part of the US.  

                   Mankind's first interference with the river came when an Ohioan created a boat with a winch that was able to clear the underwater snags of trees that blocked the river.  The snagboat "did more to change the ecosystem of the antebellum south bashing open the Mississippi's ancient waterways so thoroughly that, in a strange way they began to disappear." Congress asked the Corps of Engineers to improve navigation on the Mississippi and the Ohio. Rocks and rapids were dynamited, and after the snags were removed, so were trees along the banks. With the trees  gone however, the banks began to shift. The steam powered riverboat changed the Mississippi, as it became a busy highway moving the nations' people and goods in both directions. However, as the Civil War approached, the railroads became the prime movers in America.

                  The levees on the river had started "as a waist-high barrier along the New Orleans riverbank in 1720." They spread north and south but were not able to stop flooding. Among hydrologists, there were two schools of thought: one believed in expanded levees and the other proposed extensive reservoirs to control the flooding. The eventual conclusion was to deepen the river by channeling it between extensive levees. By the 1920's, ninety-percent of the floodplain was cut behind levees. The river was tamed, or so it seemed. In August 1926, the Great Flood began. It rained in the heartland for months. By the following April, a million acres were underwater and fifty thousand people lost their homes. Levees failed all along the lower basin. "By the end of that spring, the levees along the Mississippi and its tributaries had failed in more than two hundred places. In June, a second flood crest caused by snowmelt in the north, poured through the still-open gaps. Water covered 16.5 million acres across seven states." The Flood Control Act of 1928 acknowledged that the river could not be channeled, and must have outlets in the lower basin. Spillways were constructed in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. In 1954, the Mississippi River and Tributaries project was completed.

                  Since then, there have been new and many challenges. Attention turned to expanding locks and replacing aging dams. Thanks to Clean Water laws, the river is cleaner and safer than ever before, but a significant challenge has been keeping the Asian carp away from the Great Lakes. Today, the river faces the consequences of climate change. Reading this, one thinks of the old Yiddish adage - 'Man plans and God laughs.'

War of the Roses: Stormbird, Iggulden - B+

                    This excellent historical novel is the first of four on one of England's early civil wars. The seeds were sown generations earlier when Edward III died in 1377 after half-a-century rule. His oldest predeceased him leaving the crown to ten-year old Richard II. The regent was John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and the king's uncle, but it was John's son who became Henry IV after deposing the unpopular Richard. 

                   Our story begins in 1443 with Henry VI on the throne. There was universal regret that he was a fraction of the man his father was. England's most famous battle king died prematurely and was succeeded by an infant who grew to be a man more interested in prayer than governing. Facing ongoing war over England's possessions in France, Henry desired an end to the fighting in France and agreed to a truce to assures twenty-year peace in exchange for England abandoning Anjou and Maine. The  fourteen years old Princess Margaret of Anjou became his queen. All of the English residents in Anjou and Maine felt abandoned and began a guerrilla war campaign against the French. France declared the peace broken and invaded in force. Many in England were unhappy with the king's abandonment of France, none more so than Richard, Duke of York. He was in charge of English forces in France and replaced by William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk. Suffolk successfully defended Rouen, capital of English Normandy against the men of the French king. But when all but Calais fell, Suffolk became the target of parliamentary retribution. Tortured and about to be executed, Suffolk was saved by the king's intervention and banished for five years. In the end, parliament prevailed. A 'pirate' ship took Suffolk on the Channel and beheaded him. 

              Unrest in Kent, fueled by dictatorial local judges,  innumerable taxes, and the animosity of bitter men returning from France, led to a peasants' rebellion headed by Jack Cade. The peasants marched on London, breached the city walls, crossed the London Bridge, actually besieged the Tower, stole all they could carry, and wreaked a night of terror on the city. The queen assumed more and more responsibility for the state as Henry's physical and mental health deteriorated. She pardoned the rebellious peasants in order to bring peace to the country. At long last pregnant, she held Henry on the night he descended into utter senselessness, and five months later watched as the assembled lords of the realm asked Richard of York to be Protector and Defender of the Realm.

The Silver Bone, Kurko - C

                      This Booker nominated novel is set in Kiev in the aftermath of WWI. The Russian Civil War is raging, spewing death and starvation throughout the city. Samson watches Cossacks kill his father, and then they slice off his ear.  Two Red Army soldiers arrive at his apartment and tell him that they have been billeted there. He realizes that they are stealing  and plotting to desert. Since he has just joined the police department, he arrests them. As he learns the ropes of conducting investigations, he finds a silver femur in a crate in a basement. He believes it is the key to two deaths, and makes inquiries in medical circles. His life is disrupted by 'Await Death' written on his front door. He and a colleague wait in his apartment for the expected attack. They kill two intruders, one a member of the Cheka, and the other is one of the two soldiers who had been living in his flat. He finds the owner of the bone, a deluded tailor who had it made in the belief it would replace his diseased femur. Obviously well received and acclaimed, but not by me.

Shades of Mercy, Borgos - B+

                 This is the second in the series featuring Porter Beck, sheriff of Lincoln County, Nevada.  Fentanyl is pouring into the county, and the man behind it was a dear friend of Porters years ago. When the dealer's prize bull is destroyed by a military drone hacked by someone nearby, all hell breaks loose. The sixteen year old girl, a hacker of extraordinary skill, is working for the Feds and trying to lure her former Chinese handlers into the open. It's a compelling and well done thriller.