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America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence
Penguin Press
April 2015
On Sale: April 7, 2015
508 pages ISBN: 1594204292 EAN: 9781594204296 Kindle: B00LFZ84PC Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
From the bestselling author of Public Enemies and
The Big Rich, an explosive account of the
decade-long battle between the FBI and the homegrown
revolutionary movements of the 1970s
The
Weathermen. The Symbionese Liberation Army. The FALN.
The Black Liberation Army. The names seem quaint now,
when not forgotten altogether. But there was a stretch
of time in America, during the 1970s, when bombings by
domestic underground groups were a daily occurrence. The FBI
combated these groups and others as nodes in a single
revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent
overthrow of the American government.
The FBI’s
response to the leftist revolutionary counterculture
has not been treated kindly by history, and in
hindsight many of its efforts seem almost comically
ineffectual, if not criminal in themselves. But part
of the extraordinary accomplishment of
Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage is to temper those
easy judgments with an understanding of just how
deranged these times were, how charged with menace.
Burrough re-creates an atmosphere that seems almost
unbelievable just forty years later, conjuring a time
of native-born radicals, most of them “nice
middle-class kids,” smuggling bombs into skyscrapers
and detonating them inside the Pentagon and the U.S.
Capitol, at a Boston courthouse and a Wall Street restaurant
packed with lunchtime diners—radicals robbing dozens
of banks and assassinating policemen in New
York, San Francisco, Atlanta. The FBI, encouraged to do
everything possible to undermine the radical underground,
itself broke many laws in its attempts to bring the
revolutionaries to justice—often with disastrous
consequences.
Benefiting from the extraordinary
number of people from the underground and the FBI
who speak about their experiences for the first
time, Days of Rage is filled with
revelations and fresh details about the major
revolutionaries and their connections and about the FBI
and its desperate efforts to make the bombings stop.
The result is a mesmerizing book that takes us into the
hearts and minds of homegrown terrorists and federal
agents alike and weaves their stories into a
spellbinding secret history of the 1970s.
No awards found for this book.
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