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. 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. 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. 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. The FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government. But there was a stretch of time in America, during the 1970s, when bombings by domestic underground groups were a daily occurrence. The Black Liberation Army. The names seem quaint now, when not forgotten altogether. 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
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