Michael:
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>Any more specific info on those two Weather books?
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>DP
I feel like the www.amazon.com marketing dept! Buy from unionized (ILWU) www.powells.com Michael Pugliese
Editorial Reviews
>From Publishers Weekly
"Memory is a motherfucker," begins 1960s-era political activist and Weather
Underground member Ayers, who went underground with several comrades after
their co-conspirators' bomb accidentally exploded in 1970, destroying a
Greenwich Village townhouse and killing some of the activists involved.
Ayers (A Kind and Just Parent), now a Distinguished Professor of Education
at the University of Illinois, grew up well-to-do, attended private schools
and became politicized at the University of Michigan. He describes his
spiraling New Left involvement as he became aware of what he casts as the
injustice of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, inner-city race relations, and
police brutality and battle tactics, especially in Chicago during
demonstrations at the 1969 Democratic convention. The terrific first half of
the memoir details 1950s and '60s U.S. culture his own childhood, shaped by
images of the atomic bomb and TV war movies; the influence of Bob Dylan, Mao
and Che Guevara on American youth but the book really takes off once he goes
underground. He and his colleagues invent identities (often using names such
as Nat Turner or Emma Goldman), travel continuously and avoid the police and
FBI as Nixon bombs Cambodia and My Lai is ravaged. Ayers and Bernardine
Dohrn raised two children underground before turning themselves in in 1981,
when most charges were dropped because of "extreme governmental misconduct"
during the long search for the fugitives. Written without self-righteousness
or apology, this memoir rings of hard-learned truth and integrity and is an
important contribution to literature on 1960s culture and American
radicalism. (Sept.)Forecast: With advance praise from Hunter S. Thompson,
Scott Turow, Studs Terkel and Rosellen Brown, plus a 20-city author tour,
this ringing account should attract considerable review attention and solid
sales.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
>From the Publisher
Advance Praise for Bill Ayers - Fugitive Days: A Memoir
“This is a precious book, not simply because it offers a gripping personal account of the primal American suspense story of life on the run, but, more important, because it re-creates a critical point of view and way of thinking that we seem, even a few decades later, barely able to recall.” —Scott Turow, author of The Laws of Our Fathers and Personal Injuries
“A memoir that is, in effect, a deeply moving elegy to all those young dreamers who tried to live decently in an indecent world. Ayers provides a tribute to those better angels of ourselves.” —Studs Terkel, author of Working and The Good War
“Finally, here is an irresistibly readable book that answers the question, How did a nice suburban boy go from the ordinary pleasures of his class to the Days of Rage and beyond? Bill Ayers not only makes this exalting and painful journey comprehensible, he peoples it with sympathetic family, friends, and lovers, and moves us with his candor.” —Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After and Half a Heart
“With considerable wit, no small amount of remorse, and an anger that smolders still across the decades, Bill Ayers tells the story of his quintessentially American trip through the 1960s. That it is written in a consistently absorbing style with many passages of undiluted brilliance only adds to its appeal.” —Thomas Frank, author of One Market Under God and The Conquest of Cool
“A wild and painful ride in the savage years of the late sixties. A very good book about a terrifying time in America.” —Hunter S. Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell’s Angels
“What makes Fugitive Days unique is its unsparing detail and its marvelous human coherence and integrity. Bill Ayers’s America and his family background, his education, his political awakening, his anger and involvement, his anguished re-emergence from the shadows: all these are rendered in their truth without a trace of nostalgia or ‘second thinking.’ For anyone who cares about the sorry mess we are in, this book is essential, indeed necessary, reading. —Edward W. Said, author of Reflections on Exile and Out of Place
>From the Inside Flap
“This remarkable memoir gives us the visceral experience of being on the
run. Ayers writes with eloquence and irony. This is one man’s amazingly
honest, authentic, and gripping testament—and a helluva story it
makes.” —Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body
Bill Ayers was born into privilege and is today a highly respected educator and community activist. For ten years, he lived on the run as a fugitive, stealing explosives, planting bombs, hiding from the law, and practicing “tradecraft” out of a John Le Carre novel. This portrait of a young pacifist who became a founder of one of the most militant political organizations in U.S. history is drawn with amazing candor and immediacy.
Ayers begins with his education as a rebel, his increasing sense of horror at the American involvement in Viet Nam, and his growing love for his comrade Diana Oughton. He takes us to the streets of Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago, inside the Days of Rage, SDS, the Black Panthers, and deep into the Weather Underground. At the center of the book is a terrible explosion—an apparent accident—in which Diana and two other comrades are killed. The organization is fragmented, and Ayers is shattered. Slowly he begins to rebuild his life, as a fugitive, with the help of Bernardine Dohrn, whose likeness hangs in every post office in America on the Ten Most Wanted list. Bill and Bernardine become Joe and Rose, working to disarm splinter groups, helping break Timothy Leary out of jail, creating elaborate false identities, and carrying out strategic, bloodless bombings, including one actually inside the Pentagon. Ayers and his comrades become America’s other Viet Nam vets.
This is the story of one boy’s journey into life—his complicated love for his parents and the society that raised him, his coming of age into a world in flames, falling deeper and deeper into a single-minded way of thinking and the loss that all that represented. Ayers writes openly about his regrets, and what he continues to believe was right. Fugitive Days is about a young dreamer, troubled by what he saw, struggling to find a way to make the world a better place, and now grappling with his own story, crafting narrative from memory's elusiveness. The result is a creative yet profoundly honest account of an incendiary chapter in our history.
About the Author Bill Ayers, author of A Kind and Just Parent and many other books on education, is Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and director of the Center for Youth and Society. He lives in Hyde Park with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn.
Prairie Radical A Journey Through the Sixties by Robert Pardun Book Description A journey through the turbulence of the sixties. A personal history of the political and social upheavals of the 1960s by an active participant -- a founder of the University of Texas SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), and later, an SDS national officer. This young man's life was radically changed when he joined the civil rights movement and spoke out against the war in Viet Nam. He was so radicalized by his time that he helped found the vibrant and innovative SDS Chapter in Austin, a Prairie Power stronghold. The memoir is set in the context of the Vietnam years and interwoven with what we now know was happening inside the government and the FBI.
About the Author Robert Pardun was born in Kansas and raised in Pueblo, Colorado. After the collapse of the SDS, he spent 1971-1976 on a commune in the Ozarks. He has been a math instructor, metal worker and served as the associate producer of the SDS documentary, Rebels With a Cause.
Excerpted from Prairie Radical : A Journey Through the Sixties by Robert Pardun. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved A generation of young people challenged the existing order around issues as important as legal segregation in the South and the mass murder that was taking place in Vietnam, and as petty as hair length and dress codes. Those in authority -- parents, university administrators, police, the FBI, legislators and presidents--resisted that change. The result was a conflict that divided the nation in much the same way the Civil War had done a century before. The sixties changed America -- and it changed those of us who lived through it. I was part of that generation.