Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

List Price: $20.00 Details

Save: $3.57 (18%)

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Wednesday, December 13 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35

Select delivery location

In Stock

$$16.43 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

Returnable until Jan 31, 2024

Returns

Returnable until Jan 31, 2024

For the 2023 holiday season, eligible items purchased between November 1 and December 31, 2023 can be returned until January 31, 2024

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

$6.99 delivery Friday, December 15

Select delivery location

Used: Very Good | Details

Sold by BooksZip

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Follow the author

Bryan Burrough

Follow

Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence Paperback – Illustrated, April 5, 2016

by Bryan Burrough (Author)

4.5 618 ratings

Editors' pick Best History

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$12.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$28.79

$20.79

$6.05

Paperback, Illustrated

"Please retry"

$16.43

$12.99

$7.54

Audio CD, Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$34.83

—

$30.86

Kindle
$12.99 Read with our free app
Audiobook
$0.00 Free with your Audible trial
Hardcover
$28.79

21 Used from $6.05 5 New from $20.79
Paperback
$16.43

20 Used from $7.54 19 New from $12.99
Audio CD
$34.83

5 Used from $30.86

Great on Kindle

Great Experience. Great Value.

Enjoy a great reading experience when you buy the Kindle edition of this book. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.

View Kindle Edition

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$16.43","priceAmount":16.43,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"16","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"43","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"tobODpKzcUKG30X8vp4wzxgv2%2BpIRmtH7w07lUkXbDJew0HE0DqPKC2MP7MZBXMhTNMeFZXAjvlwy0FQThnk8TN0aBNiUe%2BA1%2BotAzks2rvqSBNWf5bv6UJZFI1fcvJ0adeqwRb0p3LOtPU860Erjw%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$12.18","priceAmount":12.18,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"12","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"18","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"tobODpKzcUKG30X8vp4wzxgv2%2BpIRmtH9o9hfAdFr%2BH7v8X%2Bxweiej0U0kDMIUYxj320ZIAvF0T4N1%2F3PNhAJRxaomT37QV8Xl84Y4dthJdsVNRrADZw190JcCGJXSmnpL3ZGHmkDV1q%2FOmHLJHiP1nk914J44Y9UkLNtJ2uz3oDuzMuMKuZrwspBSpfR3xI","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

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

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 time in America, during the 1970s, when bombings by domestic underground groups were a daily occurrence. The FBI combated these and other groups as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government.

In Days of Rage, Bryan 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. Capitol, at a Boston courthouse and a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime diners. The FBI’s fevered response included the formation of a secret task force called Squad 47, dedicated to hunting the groups down and rolling them up. But Squad 47 itself broke many laws in its attempts to bring the revolutionaries to justice, and its efforts ultimately ended in fiasco.

Drawing on revelatory interviews with members of the underground and the FBI who speak about their experiences for the first time, Days of Rage 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.

Length

624
Pages
Language

EN
English
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

2016
April 5
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.4 x 8.4
inches
ISBN-10

0143107976
ISBN-13

978-0143107972
See all details

Frequently bought together

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

$16.43

Get it as soon as Wednesday, Dec 13

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (Haymarket Series)

$18.95

Get it as soon as Wednesday, Dec 13

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

Prairie Fire: The Politics Of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism - The Political Statement Of The Weather Underground (Reprint Fr

$14.95

Get it as soon as Friday, Dec 15

Only 6 left in stock (more on the way).

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Try again!

Details

Added to Cart

Some of these items ship sooner than the others.

Show details Hide details

Choose items to buy together.

Christopher F. Rufo
473
Hardcover
53 offers from $16.00
David Reich
2,647
Paperback
67 offers from $4.96
Tom O'Neill
9,116
Paperback
64 offers from $10.54
Czeslaw Milosz
390
Paperback
69 offers from $3.54
Eric Hoffer
2,127
Paperback
86 offers from $2.86
Robert D. Putnam
986
Paperback
56 offers from $10.56

Editorial Reviews

Review

Boston Globe:
“Burrough has interviewed dozens of people to compile what is surely the most comprehensive examination of ‘70s-era American terrorism . . . Burrough, a longtime Vanity Fair correspondent, recalls story after story of astonishing heists, murders, orgies, and wiretaps. Few of his subjects are sympathetic, but all are vividly drawn. He refrains from making moral judgments, which makes the material he presents all the more powerful . . . this book is as likely as a definitive history of Vietnam-era political violence as we are ever likely to get.”

Washington Post:
“[A] rich and important history. . . deep and sweeping. . . . wide-ranging and often revelatory interviews with many Weather alumni.”

LA Times:
“Impressively researched and deeply engrossing."

Seattle Times:
“In “Days of Rage,” Bryan Burrough, author of “Public Enemies,” provides a fascinating look at an almost forgotten era of homegrown terrorism . . . . The book is utterly captivating, coupling careful historical research with breathless accounts of the bombings and the perpetrators’ narrow escapes.”

Chicago Tribune:
“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.”

Vanity Fair:
“Days of Rage is bound to alter the conversation about this crucial topic of our time.”

History News Network:
“This is a vivid, engrossing, and far-ranging work that provides a detailed glimpse of a half-dozen underground radical groups in the Vietnam era and its aftermath ...represents a heroic work of reportage...His work on the lesser-known revolutionary groups of the period, such as the Black Liberation Army, is in fact unprecedented; they never have received such detailed and exhaustive treatment. And to the extent that he goes over familiar territory, Burrough does a nice job of demythologizing his subjects. To his credit, the reader gets warts-and-all portraits and not hagiography.”

Publishers Weekly:
“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”

Booklist:
“A fascinating, in-depth look at a tumultuous period of American unrest.”

Kirkus Reviews:
"A stirring history of that bad time, 45-odd years ago, when we didn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing, though we knew it was loud . . . [DAYS OF RAGE] is thoroughgoing and fascinating . . . A superb chronicle. . . that sheds light on how the war on terror is being waged today."

William D. Cohan, author of House of Cards, Money and Power, and The Price of Silence:
“In spellbinding fashion, Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage brilliantly explicates one of the most confounding periods of recent American history—the era when a web of home-grown radicals and self-styled anarchists busily plotted the overthrow of the American government. Rarely has such a subject been matched with a writer and reporter of Burrough’s extraordinary skill. I could not put the book down; you won't be able to, either.”

Beverly Gage, Yale University; author of The Day Wall Street Exploded:
“A fascinating portrait of the all-but-forgotten radical underground of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Burroughs gives us the first full picture of a secret world where radical dreams often ended in personal and political tragedy.”

Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back:
“Bryan Burrough gives the story of America’s armed underground revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s what it has long desperately needed: Clarity, levelheadedness, context, and reportorial rigor. He has sifted the embers of an essential conflagration of the counterculture, found within it a suspenseful and enlightening history, and told it in a way that is blessedly free of cant or point-scoring.”

Paul Ingrassia, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Engines of Change and Crash Course:
“Bryan Burrough has delivered a terrific piece of research, reportage and storytelling. Those who lived through the period of America's radical underground, as I did, will be amazed to learn how much they didn’t.”

About the Author

Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and the author of five previous books, including The Big Rich and Public Enemies. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, he is a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award for excellence in financial journalism.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

01

“THE REVOLUTION AIN’T TOMORROW. IT’S NOW. YOU DIG?”

Sam Melville and the Birth of the American Underground

NEW YORK CITY | AUGUST 1969

On a drizzly Friday afternoon they drove north out of the city in a battered station wagon, six more shaggy radicals, a baby, and two dogs, heading toward a moment unlike any they had seen. Jimi. Janis. The Who. The Dead. They were like hundreds of thousands of young Americans that season, one part aimless, druggy, and hedonistic, two parts angry, idealistic, and determined to right all the wrongs they saw in 1969 America: racism, repression, police brutality, the war.

Traffic on the New York State Thruway was slow, but a pipeful of hashish and a few beers left everyone feeling fine. Ten miles from their destination, the car sagged into a traffic jam. One couple got out to walk. The girl, who was twenty-two that day, was Jane Alpert, a petite, bookish honors graduate of Swarthmore College with brunette bangs. She wrote for the Rat Subterranean News, the kind of East Village radical newspaper that published recipes for Molotov cocktails. Later, friends would describe her as “sweet” and “gentle.” As she stepped from the car Alpert lifted a copy of Rat to ward off the raindrops.

Beside her trudged her thirty-five-year-old lover, Sam Melville, a rangy, broad-chested activist who wore his thinning hair dangling around his shoulders. Melville was a troubled soul, a brooder with a dash of charisma, a man determined to make his mark. Only Jane and a handful of their friends knew how he intended to do it. Only they knew about the dynamite in the refrigerator.

Slogging through the rain, they didn’t reach the Woodstock festival until almost midnight. Ducking into a large tent, Jane curled up beside a stranger’s air mattress and managed an hour of sleep. She found Melville the next morning wandering through the movement booths, manned by Yippies and Crazies and Black Panthers and many more. After a long day listening to music, she glimpsed him deep in conversation with one of the Crazies, a thirty-something character named George Demmerle, who could usually be found at New York demonstrations in a crash helmet and purple cape. “That George,” Melville said as they left. “He really is crazy. I offered to spell him at the booth, but he said only bona fide Crazies ought to work the official booth.”

“That’s because he’s old,” Jane said. “He wants to be a twenty-year-old freak.” When Melville dropped his head, Jane realized she had offended him. He and Demmerle were almost the same age.

The echoes of Jimi Hendrix’s last solo could still be heard at Woodstock on Monday morning when Jane left the East Village apartment she shared with Melville and walked to work. They had been squabbling all summer and had decided to see other people. That night, though, she canceled a date and returned to the apartment to find him glumly sitting on the bed. “I thought you had a date,” he said.

“I changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d rather be with you.”

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (April 5, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 624 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143107976
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143107972
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.14 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.47 x 1.38 x 8.41 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #169,884 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #54 in Radical Political Thought
- #100 in Law Enforcement (Books)
- #129 in Law Enforcement Politics

Customer Reviews:
4.5 618 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

Important information

To report an issue with this product, click here.

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Bryan Burrough

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of three previous books.

Photo by Udaymanju239 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

618 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all photos

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

CLF

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2015

Verified Purchase

If you came of age in "the 60's" as I did, you'll be interested in this book for a few reasons. It will bring back memories, certainly, but it will also tell you what you missed. While we were living our lives, going to school, thinking about the war in Vietnam, forming relationships, being political or apolitical, having kids or not having kids, finding a job, and trying to figure out who we were, there were buildings being bombed, people going underground, banks being robbed and innocents being killed, all in the name of a revolution coming to America.

Ultimately this book is very thought-provoking. When seen through the lens of 9/11, the current terrorist attacks and the struggles/injustices that people-of-color still have with the police, all that went on during the period covered in this book looks both more horrible and ineffective. It's depressing to realize how little progress we've made.

It's also disturbing that when white radicals felt that their goals justified violence there was so little media attention paid...I'm sure that it doesn't escape the notice of the white members of the Weather Underground that they were able to go on to lead fairly normal lives while the blacks got stiffer sentences. I’m sure that they realize that had they had brown skin or foreign-sounding names, they wouldn’t be professionals leading normal lives today. So they’ve benefited greatly from the very conditions they were opposed to.

This book also causes one to wonder about exactly what the differences are between those radicals in this book and the radicals today who have passionate political beliefs and feel that violence is the way to promote or address their cause. Be they Muslim extremists, right-to-lifers, religious cults or others who are so convinced that they are right and their cause justifies any and all actions, how are they any different?

I wish that at the end of “Days of Rage” the author had addressed these questions. But that aside, this is an important documentation of a period of history when the Vietnam war and other news took attention away from what ultimately is a very important question: is it possible for us as human beings to move forward without violence? Is it possible to coexist peacefully with others of different religions, colors, and political opinions?

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

JAK

Old Left New Left Old Left

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2015

Verified Purchase

DAYS OF RAGE is a very good, enjoyable popular history.It's subject is that element of the post 60's American New Left that opted for violence.Specifically it concerns itself with the Weatherman,the Black Liberation Army(BLA), The Symbionese Liberation Army(SLA) and the FALN, as well as some lesser known groups.

One of the books great strengths is Burrough seems to have no personal or political axes to grind.I'm not even clear on his politics, which is to the good.This is definitely a reporters book. I think he worked hard on this book and wants to share what he learned .Burrough tries to be as objective as he can.I think that will bother some of the books likely readers who will be looking for a romanticized view.Very few will be bothered by the portrait of the SLA, most famous for kidnapping Patty Hearst.They seemed like crazies at the time and in retrospect , nothing has changed.(The SLA is the source of the books comic moments). The BLA and FALN may have their nostalgiacs but one wonders why.It's with the Weathermen that I suspect Burrough steps on some toes .Burrough's Weathermen are upper middle class largely Ivy League radicals who imagined they were a Leninist vanguard.Burrough all but comes out and says this self perception was utterly ridiculous.After accomplishing next to nothing over a course of years, the Weather Underground, as it became known, concentrated on bombing rest rooms in public buildings.When that began to seem utterly pointless , they surrendered and generally landed fairly good jobs .Burrough is pretty skeptical of these people.At one point he makes it clear that he believes William Ayers is lying about the past in an attempt to prettify it.In this portrait,the Weatherman wind up looking pretty bad;Mediocre people with an inflated sense of their importance.It's also striking how not "new" much of this segment of the New Lefts ideology was .Burrough talks about people who read Stalin(one can only imagine the shear torture of that).All these groups seem to have been fixated on Marxist-Leninism.

Burrough goes into considerable detail on how people operating underground were able to do what they did.I generally found this detail interesting.As I noted before, this is a reporters book.You'll learn lots about how people obtained false id , techniques for evading police and even a bit about bomb making.Burrough would definitely make a good crime story writer.

66 people found this helpful

Helpful

Alex Jones

Well-paced and engaging account of an incredible episode in history

Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2018

Verified Purchase

Several years ago, I took a class with Prof. Eric Foner covering the history of American radical movements. While Foner didn't sugarcoat anything and we did talk about the radical black, counter culture, anti-war, rad-fem groups from the 60s-70s, this book tells of a missing violent dimension to the radicalism of that era. A diverse smattering of fringe-radicals took a step beyond non-violent agitation and decided to promote their politics through domestic terrorism. I imagine that these stories don't make it into many syllabi...

One legitimate reason that these stories haven't been widely told might be that a comprehensive collection of them has never been produced before this book. I may be wrong, but it's my impression--from the author's introduction and periodic historiographic asides to the reader--that the Author conducted substantial primary research, obtained interviews with people who had never previously made public comments, and surveyed all prior literature on the topic. If someone wants to initiate a study of this era, I think this book would be a good starting point.

Lastly, I just want to share how crazy it is to read about the political motivations of these radicals from the early 70s. It's not that their ideas are crazy (they mostly are), but that many of the same exasperated criticisms of the "white male patriarchy," capitalism, and prisons, etc. could be printed as editorials in newspapers today and no one would find it unusual (if controversial). I take it as a sign of how politics have shifted. Several of the bomb-slinging radicals are revered by mainstream politicians and cultural figures to this day. Crazy stuff.

36 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Saffron Leander

Burrough doesn't romanticize these people like many an ex-hippie pushing a radical agenda

Reviewed in Canada on August 18, 2016

Verified Purchase

I know that some people have mentioned that this book lacks flair, and adhered too much to facts at the expense of critical analysis. I think, this might be slightly true, but I don't think that it detracts from the book. Rather, Days of Rage avoids many of the weaknesses that have plagued other works about this particular period.

Burrough doesn't romanticize these people like many an ex-hippie pushing a radical agenda. He is clear-sighted about the nature of the radical underground, which seems to be created by equal parts narcissism, violence, idealism, self-indulgence and legitimate grievances. He clearly distinguishes the radical underground from mainstream Sixties counterculture. And while underground groups depended on support from above ground supporters, this support dried up after a few years, leaving groups to rely largely on robbery and fraud to support their campaigns of small scale bombings and occasional shootings.

A fascinating portrayal of a movement that has largely become a historical footnote. Burrough brings his account of domestic terrorism and life on the run to life by interviewing G-men, ex-radicals, cops, radical lawyers, family members to give a gloriously detailed account of a time not unlike our own.

One person found this helpful

james joughin

Loved it really but perhaps a little too long and ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 6, 2015

Verified Purchase

Loved it really but perhaps a little too long and a little lacking in analysis. I wanted to know more about the motivations of the key players (ideological and emotional), how they sustained themselves, what they read (or more likely didn't), what connections and solidarity they had with similar groups elsewhere in the world. The readability and general tone was good but the author, like the subjects of book, seems unaware there is/was a wider world outside of the USA

4 people found this helpful

Robert D'arcy

Good but very detailed

Reviewed in Canada on November 16, 2017

Verified Purchase

It is a very good review of the underground in the USA but i found it overly detailed. I really did not need a full description of every item of clothing worn every time by every one involved on every mission. By skimming I learned a lot and enjoyed learning about much of the time I had forgotten. As a Canadian I was not so up on all this anyway as it went on.

Ervin

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on May 19, 2018

Verified Purchase

Very well written, detailed, and covers some important history that I knew nothing about prior to reading this.

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 17, 2018

Verified Purchase

Fantastic service. Highly recommended. Big thanks for a great book.

See more reviews

Image Unavailable

Follow the author