I remember several of my classmates reading this when I was in high school. Wired Magazine has the backstory:
The next time a TSA goon manhandles your junk, thank a writer named William Powell. His Anarchist Cookbook, which turns 40 this year, laid out how to build nitric acid explosives out of everyday objects, cook homemade nitroglycerin, and sabotage communications systems from the comfort of your home, all in concise, approachable language. It launched the era of the everyman bombmaker–and the notion that no one’s above suspicion.
Powell wrote the book as a 19-year-old antiwar activist, “pissed off,” as he would later write, “at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in.” But the “secrets” he revealed were hidden in plain sight; he conducted most of his research at the New York Public Library–not exactly the stuff of WikiLeaks. And his instructions weren’t always correct. (Smoking banana peels won’t get you high, Spicoli.) Yet they were accurate enough, breezily written, and even encouraging (“making tear gas is so simple that anyone can do it”).
Powell may have thought he was cooking up a homegrown revolution, but he ended up unleashing waves of violence beyond his wildest nightmares. Timothy McVeigh, Kip Kinkel, Puerto Rican separatists, and Croatian nationalists have all been influenced by The Anarchist Cookbook. All the mayhem and notoriety would lead Powell, who now works on education issues in the developing world, to disown it. In 2000, he declared that he wanted the book taken out of circulation.”