Days of Rage

Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Bryan Burrough, 548 pages

Beginning in the late sixties and continuing into the eighties, American revolutionaries waged a remorseless campaign of terror aimed at overthrowing the US government.  Motivated by radical nihilism, hundreds of men and women detonated thousands of bombs (for an eighteen month period in '71 and '72, domestic bombings averaged nearly five a day), robbed dozens of banks, and imagined themselves the heroic champions of the same people they were busy robbing, maiming, and killing.

How and why an element of the civil rights movement metastasized into terrorist cadres is the subject of Bryan Burrough's excellent history of some of the most famous (Weatherman, the Symbionese Liberation Army, FALN) and more obscure (NWLF, the Family) organizations.  Not that Burrough is an Establishment apologist - the book is also peppered with brutal cops and rights-violating FBI agents, from COINTELPRO to the murder of Fred Hampton by Chicago police.  Based largely upon extensive interviews with participants on both sides of the law, Days of Rage is a surprisingly intimate portrait of a time when idealism served as a mask for anger and ignorance, when hatred and arrogance rhymed.