There's a book on BARD which I am currently reading called Days of Rage. It
was on the NYT best seller list and also reviewed in The Nation. The author
is a mainstream investigative reporter who writes about the violence
involved with anti-war, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist demonstrations,
mostly in the late 60's and in the 70's. His description of the Weathermen
is most horrifying. He writes about the Black Panthers, rather objectively,
but with little empathy. There is no analysis of the conditions that
motivated the activities which he describes and as far as I can tell, when
discussing the black movements, he gets most of his information from law
enforcement and media accounts. But when describing SDS and the Weathermen,
he uses information from interviews with participants. The book is very
disturbing. His description of the activities of Bill Ayers and Bernadette
Dorne surprised me because I'd heard interviews with them whem Obama first
began running for the Democratic Presidential nomination and he had been
demonized for knowing them. In the interviews, they sounded like typical
middle class liberals which is not how they are described in this book. I've
just found Bill Ayers' Fugitive Days on Bookshare which I will download. Of
course, anyone can write anything in a book. So his description may be
comforting and also, completely untrue. There's also a book on the history
of the Black Panthers which had been sitting on my BARD wish list, so I've
downloaded that, too, for comparison with what is in Days of Rage. I also
have to say that what the author of Days of Rage had to say about Malcolm X,
was rather different from the very extensively researched book about him
that was written a few years ago and is on BARD. All of this reminds me of
some debates we had with Ted about what is actually true and about there
being several sides to every story.
Miriam
