This book tackles one of the best-known episodes of violence in twentieth-century South African history yet brilliantly succeeds in offering a novel interpretation that changes our understanding of the race-class nexus at the center of South African historiography. Jeremy Krikler's sensitive and penetrating book immediately draws the reader into the lives not only of the main protagonists in the strike but also of black “bystanders” who suffered grievously at the hands of white mobs. The result is a first-rate narrative that honors the ordinary men and women who expired on the barricades as well a subtle analysis that does justice to the complexities of white workers' cause against the powerful gold mining industry in a campaign that dismantled the authority of the state. Krikler wisely forsakes the many, often “structural” debates about the origins of racial segregation in South Africa in favor of an approach that reconstructs the uncertain evolution of forces that culminated in pitched warfare between white miners and General Jan Smuts's pro-mining government. The book employs multiple archival sources to trace the interlocking strategies of white mineworkers, union leaders, mine owners, and state officials and demonstrate how a strike that all parties knew was coming became an explosion marked by two forms of violence. The first, the pitched battle between white “revolutionary” strikers and the state, is familiar but is nevertheless analyzed in such meticulous and lively detail that much of it appears fresh. By contrast, the second episode of violence will strike even seasoned scholars of South African history as a revelation. Because no previous scholar has explored the “racial pogrom” (p. 15) that rampaging white workers inflicted on innocent blacks, Krikler rescues the cold-blooded “racial killing” from oblivion. He also uses the event to illuminate the ambiguities of white workers' racial and class politics. White workers who were fired by increasingly militant socialist rhetoric were also infamously racist. Yet this book convincingly demonstrates that the “racial pogrom” was an accidental event that stemmed from a fortuitous fracas between African mining guards and a passing commando of white workers. Drawing on analyses of the “Red Summer race riots” that rocked several American cities immediately after World War I, Krikler argues that the “pogrom” was sparked by a combination of immediate circumstances and wild rumors. When the “pogrom” ended, militant white workers resumed their focus on their primary antagonist—the police and army forces that were also assembling in the streets of Johannesburg, and who had decisively brought the pogrom to an end. Both the accidental nature of the pogrom as well its subsidence confirms a major argument that runs through this book. Like white workers in the American South, South Africa's militant white workers may have been driven by “the fear of competition” with cheaper black workers, but they were not long distracted by it. Class militancy trumped racial animosity and culminated in the violent strike against the state-supported mining industry. Krikler's conclusion that “black people were not identified as the enemy by plebian whites” (p. xi) therefore invites comparisons with the American South, where “race baiting” frequently overshadowed and diluted white labor militancy.