"My great faith in the wonder worker, the spoken word, is no more," laments the anarchist Emma Goldman in her preface to her first collection of writings, Anarchism and Other Essays (1910). It is an odd admission from one who continued grand lecture tours until her incarceration in 1917 and her subsequent deportation two years later and of whom her friend and associate, Alexander (Sasha) Berkman, wrote to a mutual friend, "EG's forte is the platform, not the pen, as she herself knows very well." Her point, however, was perhaps to substitute for the electricity that she knew she generated from the platform the "intimate" relationship that she professed to share with the reader and to honor the latter as belonging to an elite group, "the few who really want to learn, rather than the many who come to be amused." The notoriety that she achieved and the fear that...