Customer Reviews

Fugitive Days: A Memoir

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(36)

 

 

First, some straight facts. Ayers is, and was, a "radical from the sixities", but many of his radical actions were at the tail end of that infamous decade and a good portion of this book relates to the seventies, 1970 to '75, not the over-reported, mythical "60's". Second, he was not representative of "baby boomers" or even the anti-Viet Nam war movement and, though you can't tell it from the bio sketch or the book, he might even be too old to be a member of that much maligned group, the boomers.
Ayers was a key member of a small splinter group known as Weatherman. It can aruged that his group, and other "direct action" radicals, actually helped put an end to the serious, mass movement against the war in Viet Nam by going so far out in front of the understanding of the American public as to appear to have landed from some distant planet. To the older generation, they appeared to be the living, breathing, violent confirmation that the anti-war movement was unpatriotic and even bent on the ultimate destruction of the America. They were right about the war in Viet Nam, but probably little else.

All that said, this is a fast paced, quick trip through the minds of hearts of one sub-set of deadly serious radicals. Ayers is most honest in revealing his youthful fantasies about women, free love and about the attractions of beer, dope and a freewheeling way of life. He faithfully reconstructs the all too rapid, and slippery, path to radicalism taken by himself and his commrades (his term). He takes pride in their ability to live underground and elude the FBI, while planning and carrying out their clandestine actions.

This is a highly useful book for those who lived some measure of adult life in the time period and for those who, coming afterword, might not understand even a small fraction of what happened to the country. He takes us on a fast ride through the malleable minds of youth set on revolution or self destruction, whichever comes first.

Ultimately, however, to me this is a dishonest book by a man who demonstrates little or no growth from the period of his extreme youth and extreme politics. This is a difficult conclusion for me to assert, because I was a sometime active participant in the anti-war movement at about the same time as the author (though, I think, considerably younger than he). I briefly dated the younger sister of one of the main characters in the weatherman psycho-drama mentioned prominently in the book and I was entirely sympathic to their goal of ending the war. Despite the fact that the Weatherman were often times seen as borderline crazies even within the movement, I would like to believe that some good could come from such difficult times. I know that they believed they were out to save our country, in the same way that, a hundred years earlier, those who opposed slavery took on an unpopular, and dangerous, cause. If they had succeded, we might now call them heros.

Ayers, to my eye, explains little or nothing of the historical, social, poltical and personal decisions that led him toward smashing windows, building bombs and fighting hand to hand with the police. It/s as if he woke up one day and found himself to be a radical, one who was, somehow, personally, deeply charged with carrying out radical acts unlike any in American history. While the group was middle class and intelllectually oriented, there is no hint of educated people feeling their way toward difficult conclusions. What about the intervening 25 or so years? Has his thinking changed? Is he agast at his younger self? Aside from saying repeatedly that the weatherman actions were far in front of their abilities, he makes few, if any, apologies.

There is no critical looking back in this book, only an attempt to recreate the borderline insanity of youthful arrogance combined with a strong sense of mission that propelled a small group of people to believe that they could take the world by the tail and shake it till it did what they wanted. At one point in the book, he says he and a fellow radical wondered if their whole generation was doomed. No, Bill, you were doomed. The young people of that era have gone on to do many things, some good, some bad, some wonderful.

This book will do little to help people understand the why of what came very close to being America's second civil war. It is valuable, nonetheless, because it takes us behind the scenes, and, in a cusory fashion, into the brains of one radical group. It clearly demonstrates their dedication and determination to the cause, if not their intelligence. In a purely logical sense, the weatherman, and others, were completely correct in deciding that strong action was required to try to prevent the deaths of several million Vietnamese and tens of thousands of American soliders. They failed to realize, however, that they were completely incapable of taking strong enough actions to reverse the policy of their government and, instead, were entirely capable of turning much of the nation against the anti-war movement. No radical group was capable of action, of the nature envised by Ayers and others, that would have made one whit of difference to the government. A thousand three pound bombs, on a thousand days, was not enough. None should have ever been planted.

While the book is a disappointment, there are truths to be learned. Why did the radicals of that era believe, for example, that everything in life was connected to everything else and that all of life had to be put right in a flash? Where is the well of arrogance from which the belief can be drawn that anyone at anytime in the world could perform such a task? In this respect, the book is something of a desent into madness. We can only be glad that the seventies are long since over. A generation is not to blame for the bad results that occurred, but something deeper in the human condition and in the American need to search for perfection. Ayers doesn't have clue, nor is he looking for one.

(...)

Okay: what do we have here with this book? The subtitle identifies it as "A Memoir," but that's not a very good generic fit. How many memoirs have you read wherein the author keeps pestering you every 5 pages with reminders that his account of his own past cannot be trusted or believed. Ayers does this with an interminable succession of italicized passages, each of them a high-flying poetic meditation on the gossamer nature of memory, the impossibility of accurate recall, the slipperiness of subjectivity, etc etc etc.
Ayers' first such declaration, on page 7, cannot be quoted here (...). Let us paraphrase it thus: "Memory is an Oedipal coefficient." On a regular basis throughout the book, Ayers renews his license to lie and dissemble with more and more and more of this italicized gibberish: "Memory is a house of mirrors, a land of make believe. . . . a delicate dance of desire and faith, a shadow of a shadow. . . . a way of forgetting, a way of filtering. . . . Memory is a marvel, quick as a monkey and just as silly. . . ." and so on and so forth. A solid 5% of this book is dedicated to rendundant declarations concerning the ineffable elusiveness of memory. [By the by, the above quotations are a fair sample of the cloyingly precious "fine writing" that permeates the book. ] Never for a second would it occur to the author that there are sources of information out there in the world in relation to which the veracity of his unreliable memory can be checked and controlled. It's indicative of the solipsism of Ayers' mind that not a single other work on the 1960s is cited in his self-serving --what shall we call it, autohagiography? Naughtobiography? It's obvious that Ayers feels that these repetitive prose-poems on the unreliability of memory place him and his book in a higher category of honesty than the run-of-the-mill memoirist, who might deny the influence of subjectivity. They don't. There's more accuracy, more honesty in the average "as-told-to" showbiz autobiography than there is here.

Anyway, true to his promise, Ayers omits from his narrative anything that might be of genuine interest or import to an understanding of his life and times. He's clearly gloatingly unrepentingly proud of his past (& especially of all of the Movement babes he shagged --oh boy do we hear a lot about this) but at the same time he evades any actual discussion of the criminal acts that are the basis of his sick claim to fame. Ayers can't actually talk about any of the bombings and robberies and stuff, not just because memory is a blind gerbil in swimming in a sea of cold pea soup or whatever, but because his persisting code of revolutionary omerta forbids it. "In our conflict," writes the tenured tough guy , his intact, " we don't talk; we don't tell. We never confess." Okay, so shut up, already.

There are so many genuinely interesting topics Ayers could have told us about: the internecine sectarian power struggles among various members of the Weather cult. The details about how he used family clout and money to buy himself out of trouble with the law. The process whereby he and alpha Weathergirl Bernadine Dohrn made the transition from the hard-rutting "Smash Monogamy" sexual politics of "the Movement" to bourgeois wedded bliss in Hyde Park. How's that work, Bill? Inquiring minds want to know. And hey, what kind of a family did Bill and Bernadine, erstwhile admirers of the Manson Family, ultimately spawn? On the latter subject, Ayers is characteristically coy: "We had our ways and weirdnesses, but that, too, is another story." More to the point, I'd guess, is that its a story that wouldn't easily accomodate the author's Ace Ventura-like vanity. Don't hold your breath for a more revealing sequel.

Here's what you ultimately get: Ayers' self-assessment of himself as a pretty neat and righteous guy. Oh sure, he admits to a few foibles ---"pride and loftiness"---- but these, he would have us know, should be measured against his many virtues: "confidence, passion, optimism and hope, some humor" (p. 284). Hey, what's a little "loftiness" mixed in with a cornucopia of traits like that? Another big pay-off is this: "We crossed the line and came back" (p. 263). Ayers is talking here about the fact that he and his Weatherpals used to plant bombs, but later they stopped. It would never occur to this egotist that it is not for him to say whether or not he and his accomplices have "come back." Let's ask the family of a certain slain Brink's security guard about that, shall we?

I don't know what else to say about this thoroughly diseased book. I read it with clenched teeth. My reaction had nothing to do with politics, except insofar that Ayers' manifest personality disorder is characteristic of the sectarian left.

Rarely do I have such a reaction to a book as I've had towards this one. Being someone who opposed the Vietnam War, my expectations were that it would be an enjoyable read - not a book I'd come to loathe.

Bill Ayers does a good job of taking his readers back to the chaos of that time in the early chapters of his book. And I congratulate him on his unswerving honesty towards himself and his cadre of comrades. But he is such detestable, manipulative, whiny, self-righteous holier-than-thou person that I suddenly see a lot more legitimacy in the words, "Love it or leave it."

I completely lost tolerance for him at the end when he brings up My Lai yet another time in the book and then asks when America will acknowledge the sacrifice Diana made toward ending the war - Diana who blew herself up or was blown up by another in their gang while planning to bomb a target in the US.

I wish I could rate this book zero stars. I wish I could get my money back.

Everything that is destructive to the civic culture of this country is exemplified by this morally obtuse piece of self-indulgence. Here is a man born to privilege who in his youth advocated terrorism as a means of achieving social change (for what ends does not seem to have been clear even to him)and who wrote of the radical anti-American Weather Underground: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Well, has enough been done for him now, with the murder of the more than six thousand innocent men and women on September 11? "Bring the revolution home," he advised the young. "Kill your parents, that's where it's really at." The man is beneath contempt, but even worse is the stupidity of the publishers and media reviewers who take him seriously and still worse is the mindlessly corrupt "education" system that makes him a "distinguished professor" in a position to influence others too young to have learned history or experienced life. The book is sickening in its hypocrisy and should be read only as an example of the kind of arrogant fanaticism that undertakes to bring the world into alignment with one's own utopian ideas by any means no matter how violent and how destructive. The man who wrote it should have the grace to be embarrassed and to keep quiet.

This book is not worth a read. It serves more as a publishing oddity than an honest account of an interesting and complex time. The main problem is the key character, Ayers himself, who is not a leader, thinker, or dreamer. He is instead a user of everything (drugs) and everyone (lovers, friends, ideals). Just because this book is well written doesn't make it true or valuable. Content may not mean much to Ayers but it does and should count with respect to books and political movements. This book is a contradition throughout--historically, politically and dramatically. It is an attempt to cash in on a cool persona Ayers has tried his whole life to create and "live" as well as take credit for actions Ayers did not think through or seem to believe like Oughton, Gold, Robbins, and the rest of the people who gave their lives to the cause. [. . ..] He is not a warrior or a true believer. He is an opportunist. He asks the reader to suspend their knowledge of history and common sense in order to feel sympathy and/or understanding for his actions. In the end, the book falls very short. The only question that is not clear is how and why did Bernardine Dohrn who is the real deal end up with him?

This book shows us that there is a fine line between "social justice" and a "sociopath." And that you can have a VERY successful career if you're the latter claiming to embrace the former.

Bill Ayers is an only-in-America success story: a guy who goes from being a Loser with a capital L to being a Loser with tenure and a book contract (and a capital L). That's funny, because he HATES America. Anyone else who engaged in the shenanigans of Ayers and his peers while living in Soviet-era Ukraine would have been chopped into tiny pieces and fed to feral dogs.

I forced myself to read this book (which isn't very well-written) because I had read a couple of Obamacentric books and Ayers's name kept coming up. Of course, the biggest questions everyone had about Ayers, during the presidential campaign, were, "What was his relationship to Barack, exactly? And did he contribute to (ie, "ghost write") Obama's own memoir?"

I don't know for sure, but if ham-handed amateurish writing is a "tell," then it's highly possible both books share the same author.

As for shedding light specifically on Obama, the events of "Fugitive Days" take place prior to their first meeting. That said, the two men have a lot of ideological common ground.

At any rate, Bill Ayers is one of those sad guys who got stuck on the dark side of adolescence and who will probably never find his way to adulthood. He never achieves any insight or wisdom as he ages. He just keeps trying to pull one over on The System while letting The System take care of him. This hypocrisy would bother anyone with a conscience, but that doesn't fit our Bill.

The biggest insight from this book was that it shows the true face of what was going on in America with the anti-war movement. I was born at the end of the Baby Boom, and so I was still little when Ayers and his comrades were running around trying to kill police officers. But the narrative I (and my peers) have been fed about the Vietnam issue was that the conflict was unjust, and that idealistic young people who were committed to peace stood up to authority with nothing more than a strong moral sense.

But according to Ayers, this is WRONG. There was no "peace movement." He says that they wanted the US out of Vietnam, and that he and his friends "would be VC guerrillas attacking a US outpost." They weren't opposed to the war on principle--they were in full support of the Communist China-backed regime that was violently crushing basic civil liberties, and exterminating large numbers, of the Vietnamese people.

This book has done more than any other piece of writing to convince me that the US was not only justified in our involvement in Southeast Asia, but that we should have done a lot more here at home to bring the hammer down on Ayers and his ilk.

Here are some highlights:

*Ayers hates being white: Ayers spends a lot of time wishing he belonged to a different ethnic group than his boring suburban white-bread family. Well, you can't control the marriage choices of your ancestors. He first yearns to become Italian; then Jewish (fortunately, he spares us the details of this endeavor.)and then he creates a black identity. (It's weird, but for his family, not unusual. His brother John gets a job in southern California and works with a lot of Hispanic people. Guess what?!?!?! He adopts the name "Juan" and pretends to be Chicano.)

*One of the more irritating techniques he uses is always capitalizing "black" and never capitalizing "white," unless it's the first word in a sentence. For instance, "...also, Blacks and whites..." I personally don't care whether he chooses to capitalize race or not, although capitalizing race shows a poor grasp of mechanics. But hey Bill, at least be consistent! If you capitalize one word, capitalize the other word.


* Bill describes his journey toward radicalization. He discusses his choice to hang around with people who make an organized effort to destroy American society violently--participating in riots and mayhem, and planting bombs in public areas. He's never the bomb-maker or the bomb-placer, but he's "with" people who do this. That's clever--he knows all about this but really never actually handled anything that blew up. (He also, to this day, has never apologized for his role in this idiocy.)

*In the beginning of the book, he describes how his former girlfriend was killed when the house she was in blew up "by mistake," leaving a crater...a perfect example of poetic justice. They were really lucky that no passers-by were killed, but according to Bill's constant rationalization, they wouldn't have cared much about that, anyway.

*He and his friends form terrorist cells and, for poor college kids, travel a lot. At one point, one of his yo-yo buddies actually sets fire in a jail cell, which provokes the guards to mistreat them. Wow, what a strange reaction those uptight guards had! Ayers also describes Mayor Daley as having "the stench of evil." As a life-long Chicagoan, I can say that this is a STRETCH. Daley may have made some bad decisions, but he did manage to keep the lid on a lot of violence percolating in the city during the Democratic Convention. His infamous "shoot to kill" order did not actually result in any deaths, although it achieved the desired effect of scaring arsonists/murderers.

*Because of committing felonies left (haha) and right, Ayers et al ended up on the run. He and his cohort were a lot like little kids forming a club and then playing cops and robbers...aliases, secret hideouts, etc. It's a shame that, when they finally did surface to turn themselves in, the evidence against them had been mishandled and so Bill and his girlfriend were not prosecuted. (Hey, I thought we had the death penalty for treason! And army desertion, too, which his brother proudly did.)

*Ayers mentions the street execution of a VC by General Nguyen Loc Loan, an iconic photo from the era. Ayers is SOOOO sympathetic to the guy who's about to get a bullet through the head. And really, I am not in favor of vigilante justice. But the fact is, Loan's relatives had been murdered by VC, he was in the midst of an offensive, and even the photographer later said he wished his picture hadn't hurt the reputation of Loan, who was essentially a good man. It is one thing for Ayers to criticize Loan's action, but he supposes the victim was a martyr. Of course he does! The atrocities committed by the VC were excused and even admired by Ayers's crew.

*"Fugitive Days" tellingly features a bookjacket blurb by phony-baloney/professional victim Edward Said. Nice.

*Also revealing is that Ayers dedicates the book to "prisoners of conscience": Leonard Peltier is in prison for executing two FBI agents who were tracking a murderer; H Rap Brown who is also in stir for murder and who now occupies himself with running an extremist, violent Muslim group, and cop-killer Herman Bell are only a few of the names.

(Given all of the above, if indeed Barack IS a buddy of Ayers, it might be wise for him to Un-Friend him.)

This book gives us a glimpse into the mind of a disturbed person who nevertheless snared a professorship at U of Illinois-Chicago and who went on to insinuate himself into the lives of thousands of tuition-paying students. That's a poor reflection on the quality of college education in this country.

I only hope that, unlike Ayers, all those college kids one day wake up to the fact that Ayers, and his causes, were dangerous embarrassments and that he should serve as a role model for no one.

There's only one thing worse than a spoiled little boy who is constantly indulged and never made to mind. Ayers knows that the United States of America is the only nation on the planet where he would be allowed to boast and profit from his crimes. You know, guys like him make me proud of this country. Proud that we are so great that we can allow those of his ilk to freely speak their mind. But if I were you, I wouldn't pay a single, solitary sou for the right to read Mr. Ayers' childish rant.

The book starts with a disclaimer that it "feels true enough," so immediately the veracity of Ayers' account is in question. What is he omitting? Is this a definitive account or a self-justification?

I always have a problem with self-indulgent writing and over-long childhood recounting. This book has both, not to mention italicized asides that add nothing to the narrative. Certain passages of the book are fascinating (the underground, Days of Rage), but the rest is mostly dull. Ayers rhapsodizes about those things he is passionate about, mostly his hope for a North Vietnamese victory, his hatred of American arrogance and oppression (as he sees it), and getting laid. I found his style ponderous, and his sketchy recounting of events frustrating. He had an opportunity to breathe life in an important and fascinating period of our country, and, perhaps because he was too close to the action, didn't quite deliver. I lost interest well before the book ended.

The chief virtue of this book is that it serves as a reminder, at this particular time, that not all terrorists are fundamentalist Islamic extremists. As least one of them is a spoiled rich kid who is now a tenured professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and who, five days AFTER the attack on the World Trade Center, was favorably profiled by the New York York Times on the occaision of the publication of this "memior" of his exploits in terror. In light of the events of Sept. 11, I am urging anyone considering purchasing this book to instead make a contribution to those affected by the tragedy, because I feel strongly that the author, a smug, unrepentant American terrorist, and his publisher, should not profit from its sale any more than Osama Bin Laden should get a book deal to give us his "memiors" of the trade center attack.

In this book, Ayers, describes his participation, as a member of the "Weathermen" in the 1970s in bombings of the Pentagon, the Capitol Building and the New York City Police Headquarers. Read about his dispicable acts (and his cowardly attempts to evade being brought to justice for them) in the New York Times article, but please don't let the author profit from his crimes.

If the events of September 11 have shown us anything, surely it is that the killing of innocent people through acts of terrorism is pure evil, and indefensible no matter what political cause it is intended to serve. This is Ayers quoted in the New York Times on September 11: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Apparently nothing will cause Bill Ayers to outgrow his truly juvenile political philosophy, his arrested adolescent narcisism, or his chilling indifference to human life other than his own.

First, Fugitive Days is poorly written and confused. It seems to have been written only when the author was really stoned.
I can forgive poor writing. I can't forgive the extreme self-rightiousness and lame justifications for Ayers life as an American terrorist. He tries to refute that label. The hard facts are that he participated in bombing the Pentagon, the Capitol, police stations and who knows what else. He appears to have no real remorse. I honestly don't think this guy should be walking the streets. Ayers genuinely scares me, which is why I'm not signing my name to this review. Another wierd thing about this book is the constant bragging about his sexual conquests -- page after page.
I was against the Vietnam war also. Ayers, however, seems to have learned nothing since the war ended. His world is still black and white: bad guys include cops (whom he STILL calls pigs), capitalitsts, frat guys and the country that has been so merciful with Ayers. He would have been executed if he terrorized China, Cuba, Vietnam or most of the other countries he still sees through rose colored glasses. The good guys are still Karl Marx, the North Vietnamese, the working class, people who hurt cops, Che, Fidel and violent "activists." For Ayers, time has stood still. He justifies himself but honest reflection is rare.
The only value in this book is that it does provide insight into the strange and twisted mind of a terrorist. Reading it, I can better understand what happened on September 11.