Books I Read This Month: December 2024

Bryan Burrough • Emmanuel Carrère • Stephen Adly-Guirgis

Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Bryan Burrough)

The bodybuilding, British-born podcaster Chris Williamson was one of many men with questions and an Internet connection who descended upon Austin after Joe Rogan unilaterally selected the Texas capital city to be the new center of American media, the dreadful stand-up comedian having grown tired of the indignity of living in Los Angeles where he had to look at homeless people, whom he cruelly and repeatedly mocked as “looosers.” The UK expat was an erstwhile party promoter, male model, and Love Island alumnus who turned his attention to becoming an Internet advocate for struggling men after attending a lecture by messianic meat enthusiast Jordan Peterson. Not exactly a promising origin story, but it was supposed to be a kinder, gentler version of the manosphere. Williamson’s ostensible goal is to mend males, including himself—an insecure, reflexive people-pleaser who often adopts the tone and tenor of his guests, some of whom are ghastly. He’s a Zelig with swole forearms.

The podcast, which began in 2018 and relocated to Texas in 2022, has veered deeper into overtly toxic territory, with the host now openly expressing ugly xenophobic opinions. You could see the cracks beginning to form a year ago. Our hero smiled gleefully as Douglas Murray derided immigrants living in England before the two of them joined forces to mock Lizzo’s body. During a recent episode, before Trump’s inauguration, the host welcomed ghoulish Silicon Valley oligarch Marc Andreessen, an ardent anti-woke MAGA enthusiast. Williamson essentially did a moral striptease when his guest asked about his recent visit to London, surrendering his decency piece by piece. “I was quite disheartened…I don’t know whether there’s a thing as too much diversity—it just didn’t feel like London,” he said, aware that he was pleasing his billionaire techno-daddy while seemingly unaware that he was living in a country not his own. Whether he was people-pleasing, chasing algorithms that reward bigotry, or just revealing his prejudice, it doesn’t matter. “You are what you pretend to be, so be careful of what you pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night.

The pair turned their attention to the recent murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was killed by avenging gunman Luigi Mangione on a crisp and cloudy winter’s day in New York City. Two moral idiots met on a Manhattan sidewalk: one, a wealthy executive who profited from denying medical care; the other, a lost young man who believed a gun could make the world fairer. It was a lethal rewriting of Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd” lyrics: “I’ve seen lots of funny men/Some will rob you with a six-gun/And some with a fountain pen.” A concerned Andreessen, who instinctively related to the immoral CEO whom he identified as “very respected,” wondered aloud, “Is [the shooting] just a one-off, or is it the beginning of a pattern? There’s this great book, Days of Rage, that chronicles the widespread pattern of ideologically motivated domestic terror of the '70s by many radical groups. There are a lot of voices in American public life who are behaving quite irresponsibly right now.”

A rich statement considering Andreessen backed Trump, an aberrant, bigoted monster who regularly encourages political violence and incited a deadly coup attempt when he lost an election. It was the definition of domestic terrorism. The 2015 book by Burrough, however, is a worthwhile examination of that odd decade when homeland violence reached critical mass. It’s a terrestrial-based sibling to Brendan I. Koerner’s 2013 account about the mostly forgotten “golden age” of aircraft hijacking, The Skies Belong to Us. Burrough recalls the boots-on-the-ground terrorists—born-and-bred U.S. citizens—who spent the 1970s bombing federal buildings, corporate headquarters, and army barracks with homemade explosives.

The idea was that large-scale public acts of violence would foment a revolution. Some radicals didn’t care if people were killed in the process, while others practiced “responsible terrorism,” aiming to damage only symbolic properties. They remained at large by living underground, funding their fugitive lifestyles with bank robberies, and using a variety of aliases to slip through FBI clutches in an era before WiFi and facial recognition systems. The author wrote the book because he feared the stunning chaos had disappeared down a memory hole, and lessons learned from the violence erased from the board. “Given little credibility by the press, all but ignored by historians, their bombings and robberies and shoot-outs stretched from Seattle to Miami, from Los Angeles to Maine,” he writes. It may not be as forgotten as the author believes, but the scale of the violence has disappeared from the consciousness. Ten years after Burrough published his book, the Internet has devoured even more memory, and the holes have become more yawning.

Bombing was already a major concern before the Me Decade. George Metesky infamously waged war with Consolidated Edison during the '40s and '50s, planting explosives in Manhattan phone booths and storage lockers, after his former employer failed to compensate him for a workplace injury. A shift occurred after the Civil Rights Movement stalled and the Vietnam War escalated, as the idea of using bombings to achieve an end moved from the personal to the political. As identified by the author, Sam Melville is the OG figure in the 1970s militant-bombing subculture.

“It all begins, in a way,” Burrough writes, “with a tortured couple living in New York’s East Village in the summer of 1969.” Believing he could foment a revolution against American imperialism by detonating explosives, Melville, a draftsman who quit his job when his company ordered him to design office buildings in Apartheid South Africa, and his girlfriend, Jane Alpert, established an underground cell, acquiring and storing hundreds of bright red sticks of dynamite in the refrigerator of their squalid apartment. They and a few accomplices gradually exploded them in the Manhattan offices of Standard Oil, General Motors, and other corporate locales. An FBI informant who’d infiltrated their circle provided the evidence that led to the arrest and conviction of Melville, who was incarcerated at Attica. He was killed by a sharpshooter, probably needlessly, in 1971 during the prison uprising. If he’s a largely forgotten figure today, Melville was the inspiration for thousands of bombs exploded by the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, the FALN, and the Symbionese Liberation Army all over the country during the ensuing decade.

Mangione, a Penn grad, isn’t the first “Ivy League revolutionary,” nor was the Unabomber. Some key figures of the '70s radical underground were the white children of privilege, educated in the best universities, who were willing to sacrifice their advantages to bring about a better world. It was a noble instinct, but they tried to do so in the worst possible way, believing from within their echo chamber that shocking acts of violence would trigger a revolution that would overthrow the government. The idea was a miscalculation of mammoth proportions. To carry out their mission, they went underground, lived under numerous aliases, and changed addresses frequently. “The underground wasn’t a place, it was a lifestyle, a fugitive lifestyle,” the writer asserts. Many assume Vietnam was the main catalyst, but Burrough shows that the movement was driven more by outrage over racism, with roots in Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. They decided to live by the X credo, “There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution.”

The Weather Underground, the left-fringe militant band that splintered from the Students for a Democratic Society in 1969, was one of the more infamous groups, ultimately bombing dozens of locations, including the U.S. Capitol Building, the Pentagon, and the New York City Police Headquarters. It was led by, among others, Bill Ayres, Kathy Boudin, and Bernardine Dohrn. Burrough identifies Dohrn, a Columbia Law School student who went radical, as the “glamorous leading lady of the American underground.” She possessed the strange, sexualized intensity of a Manson girl—and sympathized with the Leslie Van Houtens of the world. When giving a speech at a gathering of revolutionary groups in 1970, Dohrn excitedly praised the vicious murder of pregnant Sharon Tate this way: “Dig it! They even shoved a fork in the victim’s stomach! Wild!”

Such disgraceful callousness didn’t come naturally. As the author details, members of the Weather Underground worked diligently to rid themselves of so-called bourgeois tendencies—to desensitize themselves so they could commit any act necessary. It was a cult-like destruction of norms that used weapons training, Marxist texts, and EST-esque “criticism/self-criticism” sessions to change hearts and minds. Orgies where everyone indiscriminately screwed everyone, in a program they called “Smash Monogamy,” were another tactic intended to erase inhibitions. In a sense, anonymous fucking led to the anonymous bombing. One member quit the Weather Underground mid-orgy when he noticed one of his partners had pubic lice in her eyebrows. It was that kind of chaos. The SLA, which made nation-shaking news after the 1974 kidnapping of publishing heiress Patty Hearst, had its members engage in similarly transgressive activities to “strip them of individualism” and enable them to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. After Emily Harris of the SLA shot and killed a mother of four during a bank robbery meant to fund more explosions, she callously said, “Oh, she’s dead. But it doesn’t really matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway.” In their urgent mission to help humans, they had lost their own humanity.

Beyond the fancy people who went rogue, Burrough profiles numerous incarcerated autodidacts who remade themselves into revolutionaries in prison libraries. Donald DeFreeze became radicalized at Vacaville Prison and adopted the nom de guerre, “General Field Marshal Cinque,” after co-founding the SLA. George Raymond Luc Levasseur, described as a “cross between Rasputin and Jesus Christ,” was a Vietnam veteran from Maine who was sentenced to prison for five years for peddling a small amount of pot. Behind prison walls, he transformed himself into a Marxist subversive and established, upon his release in 1974, the United Freedom Front, which robbed armored trucks and exploded bombs throughout the Northeast.

Throughout the decade, these half-dozen or so groups of self-styled revolutionaries planted and detonated a shit ton of explosives—more than 1,900 domestic bombings in 1972 alone—released manifestos and press releases—and accomplished pretty much nothing. Some people were injured or killed by the explosions, and no social progress resulted. The book takes its title from the “Days of Rage” demonstrations that the Weathermen carried out in October of '69 in Chicago. Only 200 protesters showed up for these street fights with police, and Fred Hampton refused to get his branch of the Black Panthers involved, referring to the fraught political action as “Custeristic.” The riotous behavior proceeded as planned and was a disaster. It was emblematic of the decade of revolts writ large. As early as 1973, it was apparent to some in the underground that their violence was fruitless. “There was a lot of talk about the role of armed actions because we had done a lot of them, and nothing had changed,” one former member recalls. No “combat force determined to launch guerrilla warfare in the streets of America” ever emerged. “We were so, so, so deluded,” said Elizabeth Fink, a radical attorney who abetted some of the revolutionaries, shortly before she died in 2015.

Some militants never reemerged from the underground and will go to their graves under one alias or another. Others eventually surfaced during the 1980s, though almost none did more than a little prison time, with very little evidence remaining to tie them to felonies. They’d manage to beat the system, though some ultimately became a microcosm of the system they despised. Dohrn and the other leaders of the Weather Underground realized too late the inequality of their hierarchy. They lived in lovely Victorian homes and houseboats while their soldiers lived in poverty. They failed to aid fellow revolutionary groups run by Black radicals at key junctures. And their violence, just like the government-run war machine they railed against, was ultimately just sound and fury, signifying nothing.

They weren’t wrong about America’s injustices. They escaped punishment, but so did the architects of inequality, racism, and war. Henry Kissinger stained the Earth for a century, a monster who was mostly celebrated. It was in 1970 that Milton Friedman published his New York Times essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” which convinced American CEOs to care about earnings at the expense of employees. Decades later, we’ve finally hit rock bottom.

We have a president elected by the majority—a QVCaesar aiming to rekindle imperialism at this late date, backed by an administration of bigots, kooks, and grifters. The doped-up richest man in the world is throwing up a Sieg Heil! as he pillages our government with impunity. Eighty years after the conclusion of WWII, swastikas have been normalized in America. Our corporate chieftains and congresspeople have capitulated in the most craven manner to this Constitutional crisis. We’ve reached a tipping point—a boiling point. As Andreessen and Williamson bonded over xenophobia, the venture capitalist reflexively identified with the slain insurance CEO—perhaps realizing that the corrupt government he helped create is now beyond the law. And what happens when laws are ignored and the people are told they’re powerless? He should be worried. We all should.•

V13: Chronicle of a Trial (Emmanuel Carrère)

Not to be overly litigious with a book centered around litigation, but French journalist Emmanuel Carrère makes an odd confession at the outset of his gripping nonfiction account of the trial that took place six years after the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. During that horrific spree, Islamic terrorists used explosives and assault rifles to murder 130 people and injure hundreds more at the Bataclan theater, outside the Stade de France, and at several bars and restaurants, scarring the survivors physically and psychologically. It was an attack on humanity as well as community, coordinated acts of terror designed to strike down drinkers, diners, and concertgoers who gathered to enjoy collective experiences. Survivors recall being stalked by gunmen, crawling through pools of blood, seeing others die with faces obliterated by AK-47s, and human flesh raining down on them like confetti after the attackers detonated their suicide vests and belts. Carrère acknowledges a curious reason for accepting his editors’ request at L’Obs to spend nearly a year in court, distilling painful testimony into a crisp 1,400 words each week: personal growth. “The main reason,” he writes, “is that hundreds of human beings who share the experience of having lived through the night of November 13, 2015, who survived it or survived their loved ones, will stand before us and speak. Day in, day out, we will hear extreme experiences of death and life, and I think between the time we first enter this courtroom and when we leave it for good, something in all of us will have shifted ground.” The candor is appreciated if discomfiting. The aftermath of a mass terror shouldn’t be a vehicle for self-actualization.

Dubious motivation aside, Carrère thrives as an empathetic courtroom reporter, economically conveying not only the nuances of the French legal system but also the emotional outpouring of the hundreds of survivors and loved ones of the murdered. Each speaker is allowed 15 minutes to address the court, clarifying that the trial is as much about giving them closure as it is about meting out punishment. Some seek restorative justice, and others want the murderers to rot in hell; both reactions are valid. “Death comes, and with it silence,” says Maia, who was 27 on that awful day and speaks early in the trial. She was the only survivor at a bar table she and her husband, Amine, shared with a couple of friends in a regular TGIF ritual. After the shooting ends, there’s a lull before the quiet is interrupted by rescue workers rushing into the establishment. Maia is still lying on the floor, unaware that her husband has had 22 bullets enter his lungs, liver, and heart, killing him instantly. She rolls over and finds his face. “All I can see are his eyes and they’re empty,” she says, knowing Amine is dead.

The physical challenges survivors contend with because of bullet wounds to the limbs are easy to see—the rugby player who can no longer run, the acrobat who’s lost the use of her arms—but the emotional damage is just as striking. A young man, who was 21 at the time of the attacks, speaks near the end of the marathon trial. He was one of the approximately 1,500 people at the Bataclan at the Eagles of Death Metal concert. Overwhelmed by survivor’s guilt, the man has struggled with mental health issues and substance abuse. He tells the court that he lives in shame because he “pushed, crushed, and trampled his way through the crowd” to reach safety. He cared only about his survival in those horrible moments, no one else’s. Others behaved heroically, while he did not. He tearfully asks for forgiveness from those he may have stomped on while rushing to the exits, then quickly leaves. The young man isn’t there to hear the testimony of the next Bataclan survivor, who says that someone stepped on him while he was lying on the floor breaking two of his ribs and “two broken ribs is no big deal.” He exhorts the man to forgive himself, but the guilt-ridden soul has already left the building. A lawyer runs out of the court and catches up to the distraught man on the steps of the Palais de Justice to relay what occurred in his absence. With such small acts of kindness, something like healing can begin.

All terrorists directly responsible for the violence died during the attack—the police shot some, and the rest committed suicide. Salah Abdeslam, who was supposed to participate in the mass murder, turned away from the carnage at the last moment. His suicide belt may have malfunctioned, but it seems more likely he got cold feet. He’s the central figure on trial. The other 19 defendants are secondary players, accused of aiding the terrorists’ preparations or helping them escape. A number of them appear to have had no idea that they were supporting terrorists, though they’ve spent the previous six years in prison regardless. They sit inside a bullet-proof glass box during the proceedings. Headed for France’s harshest life-without-parole sentence—an anomaly for someone who committed no direct violence—Abdeslam isn’t remotely credible when he claims he obtained explosives just to “set off fireworks.” Osama Krayem, who helped obtain weapons for the attackers, was knowingly in cahoots with them. He was already notorious for being among the 15 ISIS members in combat fatigues who appeared in the video of the Jordanian fighter pilot who was burned alive in a cage in Syria that same year—the “most atrocious of the atrocious Islamic state videos.”

A major gap in Carrère’s book is his failure to investigate how young people transformed from lowercase fuck-ups into monstrous terrorists. “What interests me,” he writes, “is the long historical process that produced this pathological mutation of Islam.” He seems to take Abdeslam’s quote about the trial seriously: “It’s like reading the last page of the book; what you should do is read the book from the start.” Carrère also sympathizes with defendants who point out that Western states frequently bomb Arab countries and even invade them without cause, as they did in Iraq, yet treat retaliation as an unprovoked act. But then…nothing, the journalist never follows up. One could argue that’s outside the book’s scope, given its focus on the trial. But Carrère presents an extended, breathtaking crime procedural about the escape and eventual capture of the terrorists’ accomplices, so his purview is wider than the courtroom. It’s an odd omission.

Because we are talking about humans, those wonderfully inconsistent creatures, there are surprising dichotomies, gallows humor, and bizarre behavior on display. After the attacks, a black Hewlett-Packard PC used by some of the terrorists is recovered by police from a trash bin in Belgium where the violence was planned. Its activity history is reconstructed and reveals that in between viewing ISIS beheading videos, one of the terrorists watched the 1953 Sacha Guitry twin-switch dramedy, The Virtuous Scoundrel. A young Frenchwoman who was present at the Bataclan at the Eagles of Death Metal concert remembers not wanting the indignity of dying with her last act having been paying 30 euros to watch a mediocre group of “California redneck” musicians. (The band’s singer, Jesse Hughes, visits the trial and comes off extremely well.) Several people falsely claimed to have been present at the attacks, either seeking compensation or for more mysterious reasons. A woman who called herself “Flo Kitty” wrote online that she was caring for a friend severely injured at the Bataclan. She parlayed the sympathy into becoming the webmaster of a Facebook page dedicated to connecting the survivors. She did a lot of good, but it was later revealed that she had no such friend.

Aurelie, whose husband Mathieu was murdered and who barely survived the siege herself, explains the nature of the previous ten months: “We were given a place and a time, all the time we needed, to do something with the pain. Transform it, metabolize it. And it worked. It happened. We departed, we made this long, long crossing, and now the ship is coming into the port. It’s time to disembark.” An ecstatic, loving party for the ad-hoc courtroom community takes place at a bar the night the trial is finally finished, with many enjoying each other’s company on the terrace, similar to the kind where innocent people were targets of summary executions six years earlier. “The terraces have won,” one of the revelers says to the author, who describes that post-trial soiree as the “most extraordinary night I have ever spent.” What’s perhaps most extraordinary is that the party is attended not only by prosecutors, defense attorneys, and survivors but also by some of the abettors freed for time served. They’re treated warmly by all present, taken into the circle, and are overjoyed by the acceptance. “I got more kisses tonight than at my wedding,” says Ali Oulkadi, who helped Abdeslam when he was on the lam, maybe not knowing he was a terrorist. The author may have found his epiphany, but more importantly, the sense of community so heinously violated on November 13, 2015, is restored—enlarged, even.•

Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven (Stephen Adly-Guirgis)

You’re a child walking with your mother to the Port Authority in Manhattan to catch a bus. It’s a different New York then. It’s always a different New York, but this one is more different than most. As you move through the porn and poverty of Times Square, you only see suffering and seediness: drug addicts, people on their last legs, people with no legs. It’s how things are, but even a kid knows it’s not normal. You’ve just started grade school but know enough to realize the city is a mess. What surprises you is that children your age are part of the squalid scene. They’re not fortunate enough to have a responsible adult walking with them, protecting them like you do. They’re on their own, living on the streets. They smoke, shoot up, and prostitute themselves. It’s all out in the open—everybody knows. But that’s not the most surprising part. What seems almost impossible is that when you pass these kids in the streets, you notice a couple of them have patches of gray in their hair. You cannot believe it. Marijuana, malnutrition, and God knows what else has aged them prematurely. They’re simultaneously young and old, just born and soon to die. You reflect on those gray patches your whole life—how fortune is stunningly uneven.

The city changes. It gets wealthy again—insanely wealthy. Child prostitution is no longer flourishing in the open, which is good, but it isn’t long before poor people and working-class folks are unwelcome. Flophouses close, and microbreweries open. NYC is now a luxury brand like Blahniks, a city for everyone no more. The gray patches, however, are resilient and never disappear. But who is there to see the gray in a city obsessed with shining like gold? For more than a quarter of a century, Stephen Adly-Guirgis has been the bard of the beaten down, the sacred-and-profane poet of those unlucky when they were young, with the scars to prove it. His dramas—incredibly painful and often hilarious—take place in jails, bars, and transitional housing, centering on emotionally wounded characters—widowers, dealers, and parolees—most of them Black or Latino, who dine on cocaine, and ultra-processed foods bought at bodegas. Some still cling to dreams, while others have given up. It’s hard to tell whether the former or the latter are worse off.

Guirgis wrote his most recent work, Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven, first staged in 2019, during an emotional free-fall. Depressed and in declining health, he wasn’t sure he had much left to contribute. Despite—or perhaps because of—his turmoil, the play is among his best. It takes place in a Manhattan halfway house for women contending with homelessness, heroin addiction, PTSD, etc. Miss Rivera, the shelter’s director, is barely holding things together. She works so many hours she barely gets to see her child. She tells one of the women of her relationship with her daughter: “The few moments a day I actually get to spend with her is all about giving her wings. Not chains. Wings.” Her charges had their wings clipped long before arriving, most barely able to walk, let alone fly. Some came from abusive backgrounds; others fell into addiction. An Iraq War vet with a violent streak masks her pain with ego. It’s a desperate mission, and it doesn’t help that the city is eager to close the facility.

“Most people give up…life is too big,” one woman says.

Helping Miss Rivera sort through the daily dramas—unstable women falling off the wagon, throwing each other under the bus—is Father Miguel, a priest with a violent past before finding God. He’s still good with his fists when abusive husbands come to the shelter to try to collect the wives who’ve fled them. There’s also Mr. Mobo, a Nigerian-born counselor who’s trying his level best to be a decent man, though he’s involved in an affair with one of the women. He’s uncomfortable with his imperfections and befuddled by the task at hand, his disquiet a source of comic relief, absurdity creeping in even when he makes the mundane daily announcements to the women: “Sunday Workshop—'You, Me and Hepatitis C’—now includes a pancake breakfast.”

Even an army couldn’t contain the chaos Miss Rivera faces. Happy Meal Sonia is a mentally ill older woman clinging to her stifled twenty-something daughter, Tania, so she won’t have to be alone. Wanda Wheels is a woman slowly starving herself, subsisting on vodka she sneaks into an Ensure bottle. A one-time successful actress whose luck ran out, Wanda hopes for a heart attack. Venus Ramirez is a trans woman whose toughness doesn’t spare her from self-medicating. Little Melba Diaz is a girl who’s been through the wringer—she’s been homeless, pimped out, and lost a baby she was carrying. Her whole life has been a miscarriage of justice, but she’s a promising poet. Sarge is a violent, bipolar war veteran who tries to keep her many issues at a distance with fury and excessive pride. She’s in love, but a single setback could send her spiraling.

Oh, and there’s a goat. One of the women brings a baby goat into the shelter, only increasing the chaos and further encouraging the city to pull the plug on the shelter. Despite often being profanely, raucously funny, Guirgis’s play is a heartbreaker. The women are plagued by self-doubt and self-loathing but also lack the basic faculties to do much more than barely survive. “Most people give up…life is too big,” says one of the ladies. It’s not completely hopeless, however. In one scene, a young social worker from a nice background who lacks the life experience necessary to connect with the women complains to Miss Rivera about her frustrations. “Just help one of them,” her exhausted boss implores her. “If they won’t listen to you, find the one person who’s trying to listen, there’s always one, and go help her.” If you want to do good, she’s saying, find green shoots in the gray.•