Scan barcode
A review by mborer23
Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the First Age of Terror by Bryan Burrough
4.0
Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher through the Goodreads "First Reads" program.
Curious about the roots of today's anxiety-ridden, security-obsessed culture? You'll need to look farther back than 9/11 or even the Oklahoma City bombing to a time when urban unrest looked like a few sticks of dynamite wired to an alarm clock.
Growing up, I remember reading excerpts from Patty Hearst's memoir and wondering whether a reclusive neighbor was a Weather Underground fugitive (Who knows? He and the couple he lived with disappeared one night, leaving their yard and the interior of their house in a shambles.) But even I was shocked to learn how commonplace political bombings, robberies, and police-involved shootings truly were in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage is a tightly-written, compulsively readable history of this "forgotten age of revolutionary violence." If you've ever seen the River Phoenix movie "Running On Empty," you might be interested to know that the story was inspired by a real-life band of would-be revolutionaries who wired bombs and robbed banks while raising a total of nine children. Plane hijackings, shootings of police officers, robberies of banks and armored trucks--all of these were committed by young radicals in the name of eradicating racism and toppling the American government.
The one weakness this book has, and it is a glaring one, is how Burrough's own voice interrupts the narrative. He makes it clear in more than one place that he does not agree with the radicals' brand of politics, which is fine. But his arch asides too often take the reader out of the book and just aren't necessary. I think we as readers can all understand that reporting on crimes doesn't require a journalist to constantly distance himself from the perpetrators of said crimes.
Burrough was able to get several still-living radicals to tell their stories, some for the first time. If you are interested in reading about the history of the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, or any of the other radical actions of the 70s, this book is highly recommended.
Curious about the roots of today's anxiety-ridden, security-obsessed culture? You'll need to look farther back than 9/11 or even the Oklahoma City bombing to a time when urban unrest looked like a few sticks of dynamite wired to an alarm clock.
Growing up, I remember reading excerpts from Patty Hearst's memoir and wondering whether a reclusive neighbor was a Weather Underground fugitive (Who knows? He and the couple he lived with disappeared one night, leaving their yard and the interior of their house in a shambles.) But even I was shocked to learn how commonplace political bombings, robberies, and police-involved shootings truly were in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage is a tightly-written, compulsively readable history of this "forgotten age of revolutionary violence." If you've ever seen the River Phoenix movie "Running On Empty," you might be interested to know that the story was inspired by a real-life band of would-be revolutionaries who wired bombs and robbed banks while raising a total of nine children. Plane hijackings, shootings of police officers, robberies of banks and armored trucks--all of these were committed by young radicals in the name of eradicating racism and toppling the American government.
The one weakness this book has, and it is a glaring one, is how Burrough's own voice interrupts the narrative. He makes it clear in more than one place that he does not agree with the radicals' brand of politics, which is fine. But his arch asides too often take the reader out of the book and just aren't necessary. I think we as readers can all understand that reporting on crimes doesn't require a journalist to constantly distance himself from the perpetrators of said crimes.
Burrough was able to get several still-living radicals to tell their stories, some for the first time. If you are interested in reading about the history of the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, or any of the other radical actions of the 70s, this book is highly recommended.