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Days of Rage
- America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 22 hrs and 13 mins
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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.
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)
What listeners say about Days of Rage
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- Luis1989
- 03-08-21
Great book
Very thoroughly researched and well written. I was also very impressed with the author’s objectivity. Overdue book as little of quality has been written on the subject.
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- woodwild
- 07-07-15
A+
Packed with details and low on judgements this is a a fascinating account of a different age of strife. Well worth listening to twice.
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