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Product Description
Throughout the twentieth century, countless criminal groups have earned infamy by their violent acts of terrorism. Political assassinations, kidnappings, bombings, lynchings and hijackings have stunned the world. In recent decades, terrorism has become an increasing threat, especially when it comes to air travel. Although in this country terrorism is not a new phenomenon, it is one that is growing-and the fear of terrorism is growing faster.
Amazon.com Review
Despite a somewhat bland title and sparse prose, Terrorism in the 20th Century is a virtual who's who of politically motivated mayhem and murder in our times. Author Jay Robert Nash constructs a frightening rogues' gallery of both little-known and infamous criminals, beginning with the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 and working his way up to the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh. Nash provides detailed accounts of early labor activism gone awry (witness Harry Orchard and his pre-Unabomber talent for making political enemies explode into small pieces) and, later, pre-Mafia organized criminal factions in the United States like the Black Hand, a band of extortionists that terrorized many large cities while Capone and Dillinger were still in diapers.
Some of Nash's accounts are heartbreaking, such as the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man railroaded in Atlanta on charges of murder and rape who was later lynched. Others figures are less sympathetic. Groups founded on certain political belief systems, such as Italy's Red Brigade, are revealed as vicious thugs, while still another set of the terrorist caste, like America's first skyjackers, father and son Cody and Leon Bearden, come off as bumbling, but not entirely despicable, stooges. --Tjames Madison
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