Despite a passing familiarity with the IWW, and some of the labor history of the early 20th century, I'd never heard of Joe Hill(strom) until I heard one of his songs by a local folk-punk band. That led me to this book, and it's quite a story. It's a bit as if someone had taken a chapter from Howard Zinn's "A People's History" and made it come to life in one person.

The book covers Hill's journey from Sweden to the US and his life as itinerant worker, part-time revolutionary in Mexico, union organizer and unofficial poet of the IWW, and how that got him charged with murder in Salt Lake City. What this book adds to the story that no previous one did, is a fairly strong (but not perfect) confirmation of his alibi in the case that got him executed by the state of Utah.

It also documents quite well the power of the "gilded age" robber barons in the fight against labor and the complicity of state governments in particular working for them and against the common worker, not to mention the difficulty of getting a fair trial when you have no money; something just as true today as it was then.