I do NOT get the comparisons to the far superior Erik Larson. Johnson is a mediocre writer at best in desperate need of a better editor. He struggles to stick with a narrative structure and instead spends way too much of the book meandering down only somewhat relevant tangents that fail to add anything interesting or important to the book. Also, the title is misleading — this book is mostly about a few anarchists living in turn of the century NYC who occasionally blow some things up before being deported to Russia. The relevance of the anarchism to modern policing is barely explored and the connections to J. Edgar Hoover he attempts to make at the end of the book seem incredibly forced. 

I did manage to learn something from this, at least — Alfred Nobel (of peace prize fame) invented dynamite. How peaceful!