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  • Days of Rage

  • America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence
  • By: Bryan Burrough
  • Narrated by: Ray Porter
  • Length: 22 hrs and 13 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (8 ratings)

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Days of Rage

By: Bryan Burrough
Narrated by: Ray Porter
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Publisher's Summary

From the best-selling 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 40 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 US 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.

©2015 Bryan Burrough (P)2015 Penguin Audio
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

Critic Reviews

“Burrough's scholarly pursuit of archival documents and oral histories does not result in an academic tome. Stories are told in a compelling, novelistic fashion, and Burrough doesn't have to stretch to get plenty of sex and violence onto the pages. The descriptions of bloody shootouts and bodies dismembered in bombings are impressively vivid. If you ever wanted to know what it felt like to be at an awkward Weathermen orgy, here's your chance.” (Chicago Tribune)

"Burroughs’s insights are powerful... 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." (Publishers Weekly)

“A fascinating, in-depth look at a tumultuous period of American unrest.” (Booklist)

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Essential for understanding recent US history.

This book was very eye opening. It's a very different historical perspective to what I knew from pop cultural histories of the 60s and 70s and helped me to understand how the right wing hysteria over all and any progressive liberal ideas was founded. It's also fascinating to see how the extreme left wing and extreme progressives talked themselves into an ideological trap where they justified their terroristic tactics to themselves. The narrative is very clearly laid out and explains how political and ideological developments led groups into insurgency.

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