Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence
by Bryan Burrough
Why You'll Love This
In the 1970s, bombs went off inside the Pentagon and the Capitol — and most Americans today have completely forgotten it happened.
- Great if you want: deep-dive history of radicalism, counterculture, and FBI surveillance
- The experience: dense but propulsive — reads more like crime journalism than dry history
- The writing: Burrough reconstructs events through interviews and records, not speculation
- Skip if: 600 pages of overlapping radical factions feels like too much to track
About This Book
There was a time in America when bombs went off in the Capitol, the Pentagon, and Wall Street restaurants—not the work of foreign terrorists, but of homegrown radicals: middle-class college kids turned revolutionaries who believed they could burn the system down. Bryan Burrough reconstructs this largely buried chapter of American history, tracing the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Liberation Army, and the FALN through their years of clandestine violence and the FBI's relentless, often lawless pursuit of them. The stakes were higher than most Americans remember, and the people involved were stranger, more human, and more complicated than any caricature of the era allows.
Burrough brings the sensibility of an investigative journalist and the instincts of a storyteller, drawing on hundreds of interviews with aging radicals, former FBI agents, and survivors who have never spoken publicly before. The result reads less like history than like a thriller that happens to be true—propulsive, densely reported, and full of personalities who resist easy judgment. At 600-plus pages, it earns every one of them, building momentum across interconnected stories without losing the thread or the reader.