I'd been wanting to read it for a while, and had recently ordered it on Amazon. The book is popular lately. It took almost three weeks for my copy to arrive.
Here's a quote from page 5 of the Prologue, that gives you the gist of the book.
During an eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day...Most bombings were followed by communiques denouncing some aspect of the American condition; bombs basically functioned as exploding press releases. The sheer number of attacks led to a grudging public resignation...[The bombings] were viewed by many Americans as a semilegitimate form of protest.The book is a survey of multiple underground groups, but focuses principally on these (listed with dates of activity):
The Weather Underground (1969-1977)
The Black Liberation Army (1970-1981)
The Sybionese Liberation Army (1973-1975)
The FALN (1976-1978)
The Family (1977-1979) (not to be confused with The Family International)
The United Freedom Front (1975-1984)
The biggest surprise so far for me is learning that the purpose of the violent activity of these groups was not the stopping of the Vietnam War, which itself was the subject of most of the student protests.
For the radicals the social turmoil over the Vietnam War was but an opportunity to pursue their larger goal: the revolutionary overthrow of American society.
Why did they want to overthrow American society? Because of the treatment of Black Americans. This is despite the fact that most of the radicals were not Black.
The violent groups saw their activity as the fulfillment of the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, which they viewed as having failed because it was not violent enough.
Typically I read many non-fiction books at once, keeping them open over weeks and months, sometimes years, with my bookmarks. I stop between chapters and sections to let the information soak into the fabric of other information I know, so the essential content of the books is connected to other things, and becomes accessible to my thoughts going forward. I do this partly by my note taking techniques, which I invented for myself about ten years ago.
Overall, my secret to organizing useful knowledge, including historical knowledge, is to be able to assign it a when. It works for history, but also other subjects surprisingly, as almost all knowledge can be organized historically in some way.
The way I take notes is that after I've read a chapter or two the normal way, I go back and skim the text for dates, which are easy to pick out, even in dense prose. The general rule is that more specific a date (e.g. a full date rather than just the year, or the portion of a decade), the more important the information attached to it, at least according to the author's narrative construction of it.
To have coherent rational thoughts about anything, one needs to understand at least partially the underlying processes of cause and effect. Cause and effect implies a flow of time. Unless you can place information in a time order, you cannot speak meaningfully about cause and effect. The surest sign to me that someone is engaging in garbage reasoning is if they cannot do this, or worse, are resistant to the whole idea.
I've even used my blog for this kind of note taking. I've found the Blogger interface highly conducive for making timelines of dates and information in way that makes it recallable to me. It can be downright fun. I can edit the timeline as I gather information, and even include links to Wikipedia articles and other sources, to help me flesh out the knowledge. Even just looking something up on the web that way, cutting and pasting the url, can cement the information in your mind. At some point I might then publish the time lime as a blog post, and move on to another chunk of information from the same source or another source. Some of these timelines stay as drafts for years on end, gathering dust in my list of unpublished posts.
But it's better to publish them, because until they are on the web, it's too easy to accidentally wipe an entire timeline in the text box, and then if you don't paste it immediately, it is lost. Once it's published, you would have to delete the post specifically for this to happen.
If you do this kind of note taking, especially using blog posts, my advice is don't worry if a particular timeline is "complete" as far as listing all the information that could possibly be in it, that pertains to the subject. That's not the point. You can go mad trying to do that. The point is to connect the information to itself, and also to other things you already know. Over time the gaps will fill in from other sources.
Examples of how I would do this for the opening chapter of Days of Rage:
1934 -- Sam Grossman born in the Bronx. He later adopts the name Sam Melville in appreciation of the famous author.
1968 -- Student protests at Columbia University over the Vietnam War.
1968 fall -- Melville talks about making bombs.
1969 early -- Melville begins planning bombing campaign with friends.
1969 May 5 -- Using a gun supplied by Melville, two Quebec-separatist radicals hijack a National Airlines B-727 making a flight from New York to Miami, diverting it to Cuba, where they are given asylum by Fidel Castro.
1969 July 7 -- Melville and several friends rob an explosives warehouse in Bronx, tying up the night watchman and making off with enough boxes of nitro glycerine to fill their apartment refrigerator. Melville's robbing of the explosives warehouse was actually unnecessary, as they could have driven up to New England and purchased dynamite over the counter.
1969 July mid -- Melville rents an apartment in the East Village in Manhattan where he lives with his girlfriend.
1969 July 26 -- Sixteenth anniversary of Fidel Castro's failed raid on the Cuban Army barracks. Melville, having told his girlfriend he was ready for his first "action", enters what he thinks is the United Fruit Company Warehouse along the Hudson River. He and his companion leave behind two bombs with delayed timer fuses. They have targeted the UFC because of its perceived history of exploitation of Central American banana plantation workers. The bombs cause minor damage and are reported in the news. The radicals learn that the warehouse is no longer used by the UFC but is the offices of a tugboat company.
One nice advantage of using Blogger for building a timeline is that by using the Text-to-Speech facility built into my computer (Edit>Start Speaking on the Macintosh), I can have the computer narrate the entire timeline to me. It's great to hear a summary of the book, presented in a more linear fashion than the author might have written it. You can even do this after it has been published on the web.
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