LUCY PARSONS

Jacqueline Jones, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (New York: Basic Books, 2017):

Although this book focuses on the life of one person born in the middle of the nineteenth century, it reveals much about our own time. Parson and her comrades analyzed America's political economy in ways that are recognizable and instructive to us now, illuminating the effects of technological innovation on the workplace, the erosion of the middle class, the corrosive effects of money and influence on public policy making, and the fecklessness of the two major parties in addressing extreme forms of inequality. At the same time, Lucy Parson's own career amounts to an indictment of sorts of the radical labor leaders who fell back on threats of violence, misread the fears and disdained the deeply held values of many laboring men and women, and alienate key constituencies as unworthy and irrelevant to the fight for justice. In certain respects, then, the story of Parsons's times is the story of our own.

Id. at xv.