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amittaizero's review against another edition
5.0
"My resurrection, dear friend. I have found work to do."
I won't summarize much here. Berkman's book was to me incredibly engaging. A bit of a stuffy idealist at first, Berkman becomes incredibly candid about what he witnesses and experiences in prison: cruelty, violence, the psychological torture of boredom and anxiety, loneliness, sexuality, etc.
Berkman was in prison from 1892 to 1906 for the attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick, manager of the Homestead steel plant in Pittsburgh. Berkman's account is a memoir mixed with politics and just damn good writing.
This review is admittedly poorly written but I was moved by Berkman's account - some of what he endured and saw while in prison jarred loose memories of a darker period in my own life when, moved by a misguided sense of duty, I fell into a prison of sorts. What I lived there, however briefly, was far outside the star-spangled comfort of bourgeois existence while also being entirely essential to the security of that existence.
Anyway, this has been vague enough. Berkman lived in a time when anarchism, socialism, and internationalism seemed to be (at least to some) moving toward relevance. Of course we know what ultimately happened: a bloated reminder of it currently occupies the Presidency.
I won't summarize much here. Berkman's book was to me incredibly engaging. A bit of a stuffy idealist at first, Berkman becomes incredibly candid about what he witnesses and experiences in prison: cruelty, violence, the psychological torture of boredom and anxiety, loneliness, sexuality, etc.
Berkman was in prison from 1892 to 1906 for the attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick, manager of the Homestead steel plant in Pittsburgh. Berkman's account is a memoir mixed with politics and just damn good writing.
This review is admittedly poorly written but I was moved by Berkman's account - some of what he endured and saw while in prison jarred loose memories of a darker period in my own life when, moved by a misguided sense of duty, I fell into a prison of sorts. What I lived there, however briefly, was far outside the star-spangled comfort of bourgeois existence while also being entirely essential to the security of that existence.
Anyway, this has been vague enough. Berkman lived in a time when anarchism, socialism, and internationalism seemed to be (at least to some) moving toward relevance. Of course we know what ultimately happened: a bloated reminder of it currently occupies the Presidency.
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