---
title: "Days of Rage"
type: Book
date: 2020-12-31
rating: 8
author: "Bryan Burrough"
genre:
year: 2015
status: Finished
tags:
image: days-of-rage.jpg
colorSortKey: [1, -117, 1]
---


The Goodreads hivemind correctly outlines the two distinguishing characteristics of this book:

1. It is *incredibly* well-researched. 2. It is *incredibly* contemptuous of the individuals and movements it describes.

To the author’s credit — or perhaps to my discredit — the former is, at times, a pretty strong vehicle for the latter. Burrough depicts the various would-be revolutionaries as receptacles of almost any possible vice you can imagine: one is a sociopath, one is a harlot, one is a very sweet and impressionable idiot, one is a foolish idealist. 

Burrough’s thesis unifying this motley crew is simple, and he uses an ex-member to spit it outright in the book’s epilogue: **these people are cult members and cult leaders who accomplished nothing of societal value and killed innocent people**. 

It’s hard to disagree with that, but it’s also hard to fit that prescriptivism into a book that is *so* dense with action and fact. I think he was at his best (as a journalist and an orator) when he lingered on the descriptions of the victims and marginal character in the stories: the hapless Brinx driver who got shot on his fifteenth year of faithful service, the young woman just trying to wait tables who falls victim to a planted bomb.

The “accomplished nothing” bit is a little weird, though. Clearly Burrough doesn’t subscribe to the Great Man theory of history, but his portrayal of social change would have you believe in something closer to divine entropy: the world changed and became more liberal (in spite of nothing, and certainly not because of the rampant civil unrest); the Vietnam War ended (in spite of nothing, and certainly not because of the Weather Underground); hippiedom became the prevailing aesthetic (in spite of nothing, and certainly not because of the post-war left).

His social arguments aside, the book was good! It was incredibly detailed. I learned a whole lot of history, and it was entertaining. I don’t subscribe to Burrough’s thesis, but I’d recommend this to anyone who wants to learn more on the topic. 