Goddess of Anarchy

I found I could not turn away from Jones’s unsparing look at the life and times of Lucy Parsons, even though I’ve long been familiar with this period of American history.

Parsons was an anarchist agitator who worked and lived across the color line in gilded-age America. But she was also a reckless if savvy provocateur whose actions did lasting harm to many. Jones follows Parsons’s life from the slave south to Reconstruction-era Texas to the industrializing North.

Relentlessly researched and brilliantly told, the story is at once illuminating and deeply disturbing.