Daniel A. Coleman's The Anarchist, 2001. 282 pp. Chapel Hill: Willowbrook Press, $12.60.

• Author: Sipress, Joel
• Position: Review

reviewed by Joel Sipress, Duluth Area Green Party

Open virtually any US History textbook and one will see the rich tradition of American anarchism reduced to a few spectacular episodes: the tragic 1927 execution of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on trumped murder charges, Alexander Berkman's failed attempt on the life of Henry Clay Frick (Andrew Carnegie's chief henchman), and of course the 1901 slaying of President William McKinley at the hands of the mysterious Leon Czolgosz, a "fanatical" anarchist who shot the president at point-blank range during the PanAmerican exposition in Buffalo, New York. In the dry repetition of these violent incidents, the bold anarchist vision of a classless and stateless world vanishes, as does the ability of that vision to inspire the most passionate hopes of some and the deepest fears of others.

In The Anarchist, Daniel A. Coleman (author of Eco-Politics: Building a Green Society) asks us to engage the anarchist tradition through the medium of historical fiction. The Anarchist centers on the fictional Jonathan Parker, a young medical intern with an interest in criminal psychology, who conducts a series of interviews with the condemned Czolgosz just before his execution. Parker pursues the interviews in hopes of gaining insight into the workings of the criminal mind. Instead, his encounters with the assassin launch him on a journey of personal introspection and social engagement. Face-to-face with the notorious Czolgosz, he finds himself unable to dismiss the assassin as the deranged lunatic that had been portrayed in the press. As Parker begins to probe the social origins of Czolgosz's hatred of authority, the intern begins to question his own faith in the triumphal industrial order that the slain president symbolized.

From today's perspective, the anarchist vision of a cooperative utopia may seem hopelessly naive. At the...