Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

Doggedly pursuing former radicals who’ve never spoken on the record before, Vanity Fair special correspondent Burrough (The Big Rich) delivers an exhaustive history of the mostly ignored period of 1970s domestic terrorism. He explores how middle-class whites joined African-American and Latino youth in turning their disaffection with the U.S. government into an open rebellion against local police and a furious urban bombing campaign, much to the horror of the White House and the FBI. Groups such as Weatherman (which later came to be known colloquially as the Weathermen) focused their activism on conditions facing blacks and managed to bomb high-profile targets including the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, but they failed to make inroads with the larger mass of anti-Vietnam protesters. Driven underground, Weatherman and other radicals such as the Black Liberation Army barely survived through the help of family, friends, and other sympathizers until they slowly disappeared from headlines. Female leaders, such as Weathermen’s Bernardine Dohrn and the Black Liberation Army’s Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur), figure prominently. Patty Hearst’s kidnapping and indoctrination into the Symbionese Liberation Army, one of the era’s more bizarre episodes, is also included. Burroughs’s insights are powerful, though long-winded and repetitive, as he uncovers the “well-meaning if misguided”—and ultimately futile—push to shake up the system by any means necessary. [em](Apr.) [/em]