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

From the bestselling author of Public Enemies and The Big Rich, anexplosive account of the decade-long battle between the FBI and thehomegrown revolutionary movements of the 1970s

The Weathermen. The Symbionese LiberationArmy. The FALN. The Black Liberation Army.The names seem quaint now, when not forgottenaltogether. But there was a stretch of time inAmerica, during the 1970s, when bombings by domestic underground groups were a daily occurrence. The FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in asingle revolutionary underground, dedicated to theviolent overthrow of the American government.

The FBIs response to the leftist revolutionarycounterculture has not been treated kindly byhistory, and in hindsight many ofits efforts seem almost comically ineffectual,if not criminal in themselves. But part ofthe extraordinary accomplishment of BryanBurroughs Days of Rage is to temperthose easy judgments with an understanding ofjust how deranged these times were, how chargedwith menace. Burrough re-creates an atmospherethat seems almost unbelievable just forty yearslater, conjuring a time of native-born radicals,most of them nice middle-class kids, smugglingbombs into skyscrapers and detonating them insidethe Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, at a Boston courthouse and a Wall Street restaurant packed withlunchtime dinersradicals robbing dozens ofbanks 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 justiceoften with disastrous consequences.

Benefiting from the extraordinary number ofpeople from the underground and the FBI whospeak about their experiences for the first time,Days of Rage is filled with revelationsand fresh details about the major revolutionariesand their connections and about the FBI and itsdesperate efforts to make the bombings stop. Theresult is a mesmerizing book that takes us into the hearts and minds ofhomegrown terrorists and federal agents alikeand weaves their stories into a spellbinding secrethistory of the 1970s.