Goddess of Anarchy

Narrator Nylsa Smallwood's bright, resolute voice fits the author's robust writing and the pugnacious personality of this audiobook's subject. Lucy Parsons was born a slave, but she didn't fight solely for African-American rights. Instead, she advocated for First Amendment rights for all people, espousing violence, radicalism, and socialism to stamp out the evils of industrial capitalism. She married a man who was also involved in radical politics. She reminds us that change is messy and unpopular, but it's necessary for democracy to move forward. This is Parsons's life, and a fascinating one it is. Smallwood sounds like she's reading the book rather than telling the story. Varying her tone and slowing her pace would have helped. Nonetheless, her crystal-clear diction helps to move the story along. R.I.G. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

October 2, 2017
In the first biography in more than 40 years of radical labor agitator Lucy Parsons, Jones (A Dreadful Deceit), Bancroft Prize–winning chair in history and ideas at the University of Texas at Austin, lucidly portrays a fiery, outspoken woman whose life holds significant lessons about the past and future of labor in America. Parsons wrote and spoke on issues that remain urgent in the 21st century: the punishing wealth disparity between workers and bosses, organizing amid police brutality, and the impotence of the two-party system. Both Parsons and her husband, Albert, called for armed struggle, believing it would act as the catalyst to destroy the capitalist machine. After a bomb exploded at Chicago’s Haymarket Square in 1886, Albert was hanged for his inciting rhetoric. Jones uncovers new aspects of Parsons’s story, such as her birth to an enslaved woman in Virginia, which she disguised with tales of Spanish-indigenous origins. Jones also casts a critical eye on the dissonant aspects of Parsons’s life and politics, such as her refusal to engage with black-working-class struggles and her distaste for doctrines of free love propagated by fellow anarchists (notwithstanding the widow Parsons’s own public affair with a married man). Despite some dry prose, Jones impresses with this richly detailed and empathic study of a complex figure. Illus. Agent: Geri Thoma, Writers House.