Can't give it two and a half stars, so it gets two. This book is enormously well researched, sweeping in its scope, and detailed in its history. Someone said that it has the character of a journalist's notebook-dump, but if you're interested in the period, in many cases even the tiny weird details are interesting.

The book, however, suffers from its author's utter contempt for most of his subjects. Not all of them-- he seems to be kinder to those with whom he's spoken personally. But he gets off to a really creepy start by describing EVERY SINGLE WOMAN in the book in terms of how attractive they are, and really revels in details like Weather's "revolutionary" orgies. From there, once we get to the section about George Jackson and prisoner activism in the '70s, his characterization is much blunter. Virtually every single black radical (except Sekou Odinga, who seems to be the only one Burrough interviewed personally and therefore the only to whom he affords the respect of presuming he's a complex and intelligent individual capable of nuanced reflection and motivation) is described as simultaneously cunning/predatory and semi-literate. The word "thug" is used a lot, particularly to describe George Jackson--so the only reason anyone might have found his writing meaningful and touching was that they were hoodwinked by a crook who wanted to selfishly manipulate readers to his end, not because (if what Burrough says about his violence is true) he was a conflicted figure, both driven by empathy and the desire for justice as by more malignant motivations. Burrough generally presumes the vast majority of black radicals (much moreso than white radicals) aren't REALLY motivated by politics, so much as they wish to use leftist ideology as a smokescreen for their innate greed and criminality. Meanwhile, all white radicals who support black prisoner-activists are written off as naive, brainwashed, and easily led.

Here's the thing: some of them were. That's human nature. The story of the SLA is ridiculous on its own without authorial commentary about how ridiculous they all are. In its slant and contempt for its subjects, Days of Rage suffers from precisely the same weakness as most radical-leaning histories of the period: it shows its hand and its sympathies early, and from that point on makes it clear (over and over) that you can't trust its characterizations. For example, a great criticism you could make of the expropriations/bank robberies executed by the FALN and the Family and Raymond Levasseur is that they appear to have used them mainly to fund... themselves. They were taking enormous amounts of money out of banks and using them, at best, to make bombs, at worst to fund their underground adventures. As a longtime red myself, I've always felt that those expropriations would have made a great deal more sense if they had used that money to fund community initiatives rather than to stage a keystone-kopkiller routine of bombings. This is one of the strangest things about the SLA-- they were an utter joke, a collection of absolute lunatics, but their kidnapping of Patty Hearst actually led to food in the mouths of poor people, which is what they set out to do, and a thing that many people consider a noble motivation. Thus the nobility of that aim contrasted against the brutality of some of the actions described in this book would, in greater consideration, make a more interesting study. (As would a simple measure of their effectiveness compared to other forms of activism taking place in the '70s, perhaps an easier project for a writer that doesn't share any form of radical sympathies.) Perhaps Levasseur and the Family poured large portions of the money they expropriated into community-building projects like free clinics, schools, and the like, but they don't seem to have, and that to me is an extremely damning epilogue to their violence. Yet I also don't trust Burrough enough to tell me if they did--he might have just left those details out.

You could say this book is no worse than similar histories written from the perspective of the left, but those books are also bad, excruciating, because of their lack of objectivity. So Burrough undermines his criticism of the dogmatic language and indoctrination-speak of 70s radicals by his own language. Nowhere is this as clear as his support for the FBI's crimes that are actually on record. To his credit, he occasionally departs from his Wall Street Journal roots and admits things like yes, for example, Chicago cops pretty much murdered Fred Hampton in cold blood. But a much more interesting version of this history wouldn't paint the FBI as ultimately hand-tied heroes the way he finally does, giving them the last word of saying "they treated us like the fucking criminals!" Yes, cop, that's because you were a criminal. Armed radicals, by law (but in other cases, such as the Brinks robbery, by moral measure) were also criminals. Everyone was a criminal, and that's why the story is interesting. But Burrough intrudes even further, noting that when Mark Felt was convicted of FBI crimes, "America yawned"--though when armed radicals did anything, he's quick to underline that America, including its left, was enraged. I'm not sure if Burrough talked to America for this book, but I think most of the time America yawns, so if you say America is doing something different you're probably presenting your opinion as America's. Objective retelling makes a more interesting story, but that's not one Burrough was interested in telling.

Or maybe not one he was CAPABLE of telling-- because he is a TERRIBLE writer. I had to ration the book to myself because of his agonizing purple prose alone. The thing reads like an airport-potboiler melodrama of the lowest order. Perhaps it wouldn't have been as long if they'd cut out every one of his unnecessary adjectives--we could probably lose an easy 50 pages there. But that wouldn't change his godawful choices of nouns and verbs. People don't "move," they "scurry." They don't "beliefs," they have "zeal." It's written as though he kept looking at words he had typed out and thinking, "That's not exciting enough. Let's see what Word's thesaurus gives as an alternative!" (Also, the number of times he drops salacious details in weasel-words is worth noting. Keep count of the number of times he uses "it was said that" instead of an actual report!) That style never lets up, from paragraph to paragraph, for 550 turgid pages. Reading this book is an exercise in discovering how much pain you can endure to learn from Burrough's research, which you ultimately suspect you can't really trust because of his blatant lack of objectivity.

One of these days maybe someone will write an objective history of 70s armed radicalism that presumes that the ideals adherents upheld were truly felt by some but not others, that some actions had positive effects, some neutral, some negative, that there was ultimately a kaleidoscope of motivations, morals, and emotions at play on both sides, and whatever happened was the product of that complexity. This isn't that book. Burrough's deeply invested in arguing that armed radicalism accomplished nothing because it was arrogant/conniving/naive bad guys fighting against the mainly good guys of the US government/prison system and American multinational corporations, without noting the extent to which all those parties were committing abundant wrongs that made radicals feel (right or wrong) that any violent action they took would always be dwarfed by comparison. It would be interesting to see an actual measure of how much these movements accomplished, but on the left most of what we've got so far is a lot of hagiography (including self-hagiography, like Bill Ayers's), and this nonsense from the right. In each you can learn a bit of history, but you have to hold your nose the whole time.