Customer Reviews

Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I was expecting a review of the 1960's from a bitter radical's unchanged viewpoint. I was surprised to find this book to be a thought provoking, insightful, and reflective account of the what went right and what went wrong in the portion(s) of the anti-war movement Mr. Ayers was involved in--specifically the Weather underground. This is NOT another rehash of the 60's memoir. If you have been wondering what all the fuss about Bill Ayers has been, read this book. You too might be surprised!

I'm going to try to review this book as a book, rather than as a political document, although it certainly has a political point of view.

However, in the interests of openness, I'm on the left politically. I was a grad student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor at the time, so I had a local view of the Weather Underground, and I must say I found them to be crazy dangerous. Furthermore, they were worse than useless. They accomplished nothing but the destruction and the discredit of the anti-war left. What ended the Viet Nam War was not the Weathermen's bombs, but a steady, relentless weariness, an increasing American body count, a relentless procession of peaceful protest, and plain old persuasion, not to mention the cynical (if not treasonous) manipulations of Nixon and Kissinger.

All that said, how good is the book? I found it tedious, mainly because Ayers came across to me as an egotist in the guise of a Principled Man. If he had patted himself on the back any harder, his arms would have grown longer. If he had made any more excuses for himself, he could have joined the recent Bush administration.

Ayers probably considers himself a good writer. I found the prose a knockoff of Hunter S. Thompson, a real writer. Ayers makes the common mistake of thinking he can put on a style like he puts on a suit. Genuine style reflects a genuine, personal point of view. Ayers isn't as anarchic as Thompson. His vision is far more orderly. He doesn't like chaos. Gonzo doesn't really fit him. Furthermore, some of the sentences are just bad, with phrase after phrase hanging off the end (like this sentence, for example).

Then there are the harangues against society. Oh, if only people could see our ills as clearly as Ayers does! Actually, people do, and they lose his self-congratulation about it.

Again, I probably agree with many of Ayers's views. However, I don't find this a particularly insightful book.

I bought "Fugitive Days" for my 16-year-old nephew. Ayers' book is an inspirational account of a young person's struggles to do what's right during troubled times when the government and those in power have created an Orwellian world where the truth can be hard to discern. Given the similarities between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, this is an important book for all to read today.

What's one to make of the Weather Underground, the SDS splinter group that blazed briefly in 1969 and 1970? Outraged by the U.S.-instigated bloodbath in Vietnam, the Weathermen tried to DO something to stop it -- and doing something, for them, didn't mean signing petitions or voting for feckless anti-war politicians. They took direct action against the American power structure -- often at great risk to themselves. They refused to let their lives make a mockery of their values. As a middle-aged functionary, I salute their memory.

But what they tried to do was crazy. They tried to overthrow the U.S. government. All five or six dozen of them. They tried to "bring the war home to America," as if they were Viet Cong, not white college kids. They convinced themselves they were the vanguard of the American working class. They even thought they could manufacture bombs without blowing themselves up. It was delusional. It was violent. In the end, the Weathermen played into the hands of opportunistic pols like Nixon, who used their tactics to smear the whole anti-war movement.

"Fugitive Days" was written by one of the inner circle, but it doesn't clear up the paradoxes. It is impressionistic, disorganized, and solipsistic. It has too much sexual boasting. Parts gush like a teenager's diary. Even worse, it has no analysis of what motivated the Weathermen, how the group functioned, or how it related to the broader left. There's hardly even a chronology. One example: the Days of Rage is described in florid, first-person detail, but no context is given to explain why anyone could think that a few days of vandalism would end the war in Vietnam.

I liked "Fugitive Days" a lot, because the author loved a girl who died in a blast in New York, and because '60s militancy was an understandable response to the crimes of the Vietnam War. But the book isn't useful as history.

Great read about the 60's and 70's and the rise of the different anti-government groups.

In an issue, last year, of the contemporary political mag "Dissent" there was a review of this book entitled "No Redemption Song: Bill Ayers' "Fugitive Days". I couldn't have put it better myself.

William Ayers is a smug, remorseless, egotistical and disappointingly ordinary man. He is nothing more than another babyboomer who happened to carry out a short reign of terror (anyone who imagines that the Weathermen's actions did anything but harm the antiwar movement, or that it was a "revolution" of any kind is still taking Dylan's advice that everyone must get stoned a mite too seriously) which has given the Right wing an arsenal far more explosive than any of the bombs he used to kill innocent people.

Even for the 60's this guy was off the rafters. For Bill, "Ho Chi Minh was poet, prophet and sage of the counterculture." Hmm. I've yet to hear that from even the most seasoned of the Woodstock generation, or the most radical. One can picture Ho Chi Minh laughing not because he and Bill were high in North Vietnam, palling around together, but rather at Ayers' naivete. This young man apparently did not know that he was killing millions of people. Pass the joint, Bill would have said, had he been presented with the bodies of all those dead Vietnamese women and children.

His fury at the murder of Fred Hampton by the Chicago Police is certainly understandable. That's why people were out in the streets rioting. His actions, however, have no excuse whatsoever. Most of this gloating, painfully nostalgic piece of garbage is an elegy for the two young people who blew themselves up (not good at making bombs, I guess) while preparing for war. Not one word about his own victims (a security guard at a college and 4 more). I didn't start out the book hating the guy, as a leftist myself, and I combed the pages for one single note of remorse. None.

If you want to read about what a legend Bill Ayers thinks he is, this is the book for you. An alarming lack of humanity is all I found.

We were assigned this book for a class on the 1960's and the Vietnam War by a professor of mine. Overall I found the book a fascinating read with an exciting fast paced writing style. It is however, a book that hangs in limbo between fact and fiction. It should be understood that as a personal memoir, this book will be biased to the views of the author. However, it is Ayer's writing style and insistence on hyperbole that give the book that "based on a true story" feeling you get from someone's story about "the war" or "the big one" they caught at the lake. There will be many instances where the reader will have to question whether or not to believe what is being told to them. It is because of this that the book deserves only three stars of five. Yes the book is entertaining, but it is being sold as a memoir of historical value and it lacks the credibility needed to be taken seriously as a work of non-fiction.

I definitely would not recommend this book as a resource for a true insight into 1960s activism. Instead it should be viewed as a novel that will impart upon you the mood of some of the most radical participants of the anti-war movement. I would however, recommend the book to anyone who is just looking for a good story or an interesting read.

A fascinating book from beginning to end. Mr. Ayers begins with a rather heartwarming summary of his formative years growing up in the 50's. This was a unique time, not unlike the idealized recreation of the Ozzie & Harriet show, which us boomers remember well, at least for a white kid in a middle class family. The narrative then jumps to his early years as a community activist (why is this such a dirty word?). From here he moves to his days as a campus activist in the very tumultuous 60's. These kids weren't pot smokers who decided to attend the demonstration on a whim. Many grew up in Quaker families,& were steeped in a peaceful & Christ-like perspective conjoined with a calling to active participation in an attempt to create a more spiritual world. Sound like a lot of fluff? Read it & weep, baby. Our government murdered approximately 1.5 Vietnamese & Cambodian CIVILIANS while perpetrating the Viet Nam war. If you want to finger a terrorist, point to Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, & a host of others. Following the townhouse explosion, Mr. Ayers takes us underground with the Weathermen, where they spent the next 7 years serving up a violent counterpoint to the U.S. government's conduct of the war & oppression of minorities at home. This part of the book is not a linear retelling of events, but has a dreamlike quality that makes for a fascinating read. Young, impulsive, driven by a spirit of love in spite of the violence, these people were definitely not terrorists. They were young people with character. They were us. If you are an arch conservative, don't bothert picking this book up (I'm sure you won't). Otherwise I think you will love it.

I picked this book after reading and reviewing Jack Cashill's book "Deconstructing Obama." There, Cashill had alleged (rather unconvincingly in my view) that it was likely that Ayers was the real author of Obama's two books rather than Obama himself. I believe that with even an average reader, it will not take him more than a couple of chapters before it becomes obvious that Bill Ayers could not have written either of Obama's books. Ayers' writing, although above average, simply is not quite in the same league as either of Obama's books. If someone else wrote Obama's books, I am certain that it was not Ayers.

That issue aside, this is an extremely important and a wonderfully interesting and honest book about a period of modern American history that too little has being written about. Ayers gives us the inside story, its logic its goals and its failures.

Contextualizing Bill Ayers

This book is Bill Ayers' story told without sentimentality and with above average skill. It is a familiar story of a well-to-do "not too bright" white Chicago suburban prep schooler; out to make a way in the world he had inherited. The first stop on a mostly uncharted journey was the elite University of Michigan, where after a year of frat-boy style debauchery, his manhood project was quickly derailed. He dropped out and bummed around the world -- first as a Merchant Marine -- and then as an international hobo who eventually wended his way across Europe and back to Chicago where he became a Community Organizer and kindergarten teacher.

Ayers had three good habits that served him well throughout his life. He was a keen observer of human nature with an intuitive sense of fairness. He also had a keen sense of what this nation should be about: protecting its democratic freedoms and racial justice. Bill was also an avid reader who was fortunate to have found MLK and James Baldwin at about the right time. Both spoke loudly and clearly to the "inner Bill Ayers." Through them, he finally saw a purpose for his life taking shape: It was how to live a life (as an entitled white American) without making a mockery of American values. He had his doubts that it could be done at all, and thus saw himself (and his whiteness) as being part of a tribe that was on the wrong side of American history, and indeed on the wrong side of humanity.

Being white, entitled, and being fair and racially just, were to Ayers simply a contradiction in terms. To Ayers, this was only a built-in shield for being rhetorically callous and dissembling about the true meaning of American ideals. In short, whiteness had become a heavy racial burden that proved to be just the opposite of his life goals, and thus it was just another way of making a mockery of American values and ideals. In Ayres' view, the white mind was being driven mostly by a subtext of inner fears about race, sex, religion and violence and this did not seem to him the right team to be on to pursue his manhood project in good faith.

The urban race riots of the mid-60s, and the Vietnam War, further clarified these doubts for him. They allowed him to effectively switch teams (that is, as much as this could be done in a profoundly racist society) and gave him the empirical data he needed to test his selfhood theories -- as well as the basis upon which he could finally make a choice about which side of history he would end up on: Would it be the side with unearned privileges, trapped in a self-constructed false race-based reality, carrying with it a companion self-contrived and artificial and mostly dishonest history? Or would it be the side striving for an expansion of this cramped "pretend superior reality" into one that the forefathers had always imagined that this country could become: A more perfect union, a participatory democracy, free of racism, fair and equal, on a planet at peace and full of justice?

For Ayers, who at root was an Existentialist, this was a "no brainer." "Life is always a delicate balance between choice and chance, a balance of will and fate," he says on page 62. For him humanity itself was at stake: the humanity of black Americans, the humanity of the Vietnamese, and finally the humanity of white Americans themselves. With his life purpose clarified, Ayers joined SDS on the spot. SDS gave him the chance to fulfill both his main goal and its primary corollary: to become a passionate and an active force in preventing America from making a mockery of it own values. But advocacy was not enough, one also had to move beyond just being a passive spokesman to becoming an instrument for repairing the damage. There thus began his long struggle with SDS and the Weathermen as a "warrior of repair" against American oppression at home and abroad.

Thanks to Mayor Richard Daly's "police riot" at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in which a thousand busted heads and one death, led to raising the stakes, the temperature, a quickening of the tempo, a quantum leap in the level of violence and a changing of the rules of engagement between peaceful protestors and the Chicago police and the FBI. Everything changed that week forever, and for the worse. Bitterness and acrimony transformed peaceful singing and the linking of arms into first aid kits, slingshots, home made Billy clubs, Molotov cocktails and eventually to strategically placed bombs throughout buildings across the nation. Chicago was no longer Kansas and the mini-Civil War was on. The new rule was that "there were no more rules." Daly's indiscriminant police brutality first invoked outrage -- even from within his own party at the Convention -- then silence -- and then a determined retreat by the wounded protestors into the underground to decide how best to strike back.

SDS had to rethink its approach as it began to see the American system of power for what it was: a lethal poison that led only to a drama of the mindless use of power that mocked American values and exposed this mockery for the whole world to see. And then it led to death: by the tens of thousands of deaths in Vietnam and those in other far away lands; but also to many deaths of America's own sons and daughters both in wars of aggression and back at home on University campuses. American power ate its young too: both on the battle fields and at home in the inner cities. Ayers and SDS deemed it the ultimate contradiction that the American government could use its power to export evil but could not use it to promote liberty, dignity, racial equality or prosperity at home. That in Ayer's view was the ultimate mocking of American ideals and values.

What followed was a multi-decade struggle to change the nature of American society for the better. It was an epic David and Goliath struggle between the "good and weak," against "the powerful and evil." On one side, were the misguided U.S. policies and policymakers that resulted in the lost of the war in Vietnam, coupled with the FBI's Cointelpro, and followed by the trail of assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X.

On the other side there was the "war of repair" - as SDS, the Black Panther Party and other radical groups on the left were waging it. Once they came from behind close doors of their own private underground "head sessions," the die had been cast: They were not going to remain just menacing toy soldiers, armed only with weak political theories, occupying the moral high ground wielding only verbal napalm. They had seen how Vietnam, a poor backward country straight out of the 14th century, had given U.S. technology and power all it could handle, and the SDS die hearts, like Ayers pledged to do the same.

So drunk on the ideology of Mao, Castro, Che and Ho Chi Minh, they committed themselves to a delusional program (and eventually to suicide) to strike in the heart of the beast. It did not work. Many of Mr. Ayers' close friends became casualties of the "war of repair." Ayers survived with the protection of a well-connected family, to live to fight another day. As part of round two of the "war of repair," he has become Mr. Obama's friend and neighbor. And arguably, he has become a backroom mover and shaker of the kind that SDS used to warn itself about.

He must be in a complete state of shock to see his ideological "cut-buddy," and neighbor, turn right before our eyes, into a dark skinned slicker GW Bush. A great read. Five stars.

Bill Ayres who has been in the nations conscience during the 2008 Presidential Election by association with then candidate Senator Barack Obama. Reflects on the 1960's anti war movement and how after realizing that signs and protest were simply not going to be enough to bring the war to a end and more aggressive actions would be needed. The Weathermen were the group that took those more aggressive actions. Were they correct ? The answer to that would probably be split 50-50 if you ask in a poll. Ayres does show some remorse on the tactics they used but he is not apologetic and on that I agree. The first 75% of this book is a interesting historic read I do feel the final part of the book slows down a bit however I still do recommend reading this book