Rating: 
Summary: A little thin
Review: I picked up "Fugitive Days" hoping to get an insider's account of life as a fugitive and an explanation of those days. Maybe Ayers' own admission that memory is shaky and not entirely trustworthy should have been a hint to me. I found little of what I was looking for. I find the title misleading. Only about one-third of the book is about his days as a fugitive and the description of that time is vague. He doesn't even describe how they finally turned themselves in. I didn't get a clear idea of who the other members of the Weathermen were and how they interacted with each other. He and Diana Oughton loved each other, but I don't get a sense of that love. He uses the book mostly to expound upon the ideas of that time and his ideas now. Definitely not a straight autobiography; more of a philosophical rant.
Rating: 
Summary: Revolting radical chic narcissism
Review: That this thing ever found a publisher is disgusting. Mr. Ayres is utterly incapable of realizing or telling the truth about his grotesque and violent ideas or passage through life. Lies about his history and motives whenever it suits his purposes to do so. Avoid this package of lies and inadequate justifications at all costs.
Rating: 
Summary: fight the real enemy
Review: One of the few books to tell the story of the Weathermen, some of whom are still serving jail time while Nixon got an easy pardon for Watergate (and after planting quite a few bombs in the Vietnamese countryside), while dr Kissinger is the seminal American war-criminal and general Westmoreland should have been sent to the Hague later on. My point is: these guys had a mission, they were the true Americans, they risked their lives fighting the war machine that sent young Americans to die in a futile war. And what did they get - not a pardon, thatÂ's for ure. OK, so they could have run away to Canada (or Sweden...), but they chose to stand up to their beliefs. I mean, give these guys some credit!
I like to read these one star - reviews that show how little some people understand about those time. There was a war going on, these guys took the trenchlines inside the United States of America where they really belonged. But some Americans are so happy with throwing bombs everywhere else, and supporting Fascist governments like the one in Chile after the 1973 coup.
The book by mr. Ayers is a strange book to come out of America where most books are written in political ignorance.
I think these one-star reviewers should be sent to the Vietnamese countryside on a holiday trip to see what their government did to a small, brave nation that fought an impossible fight and survived.
Rating: 
Summary: Bring the war home
Review: Many people around the world have sacrificed for a better world, and Bill Ayers was one of those people who did what he could from his position, in his time. He gives us an account of his life and times, and milieu.I appreciated some of the things I noticed - he doesn't really talk about how he was an SDS leader or note how this or that person was a leader, everyone is considered on an equal basis. He talks in one section about a black woman who is a good leader in her community, and how government social workers going down their lists would probably classify, in their books, as a general failure as a person. The book is a good mixture of personal and political, of confrontation with authority as well as building community and giving to the community, in poor American neighborhoods or in Guatemala. It is from the point of view of someone who grew up in a normal, middle class, Midwestern family during the 1950's, but even that would be too dangerous to hear on the corporate media, so one would have to read the book to get an idea of the world view that many people in the country and world share.
Rating:
Summary: A little thin
Review: I picked up "Fugitive Days" hoping to get an insider's account of life as a fugitive and an explanation of those days. Maybe Ayers' own admission that memory is shaky and not entirely trustworthy should have been a hint to me. I found little of what I was looking for. I find the title misleading. Only about one-third of the book is about his days as a fugitive and the description of that time is vague. He doesn't even describe how they finally turned themselves in. I didn't get a clear idea of who the other members of the Weathermen were and how they interacted with each other. He and Diana Oughton loved each other, but I don't get a sense of that love. He uses the book mostly to expound upon the ideas of that time and his ideas now. Definitely not a straight autobiography; more of a philosophical rant.
Rating: 
Summary: Well-written, but I don't quite trust the truth of it
Review: Educator Bill Ayers was once on the FBI's Most Wanted list for terrorist activities during the 60s. He and his wife, Bernadette Dohrn, lived as fugitives for 10 years. The writing is good and tight and very engaging, but there's a self-serving quality to the story-line, and somehow I just don't get the feeling that I'm getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.
Ayers story was at its best and most engaging during the first two thirds and then lost its hold on me once the bombing in Greenwich Village occurred and they went on the run>
Worthwhile, but I'm not sure it'll stand the test of time.
Rating:
Summary: Politics aside, not much of a read
Review: The book starts with a disclaimer that it "feels true enough," so immediately the veracity of Ayers' account is in question. What is he omitting? Is this a definitive account or a self-justification? I always have a problem with self-indulgent writing and over-long childhood recounting. This book has both, not to mention italicized asides that add nothing to the narrative. Certain passages of the book are fascinating (the underground, Days of Rage), but the rest is mostly dull. Ayers rhapsodizes about those things he is passionate about, mostly his hope for a North Vietnamese victory, his hatred of American arrogance and oppression (as he sees it), and getting laid. I found his style ponderous, and his sketchy recounting of events frustrating. He had an opportunity to breathe life in an important and fascinating period of our country, and, perhaps because he was too close to the action, didn't quite deliver. I lost interest well before the book ended.
Rating:
Summary: "Fujitive Days" ~ A Book of Reflection--Relevant As Ever
Review: "Fujitive Days" is a significant contribution to American popular culture and counter-culture. Within the experience of the Weathermen Underground is a vital account of what is both right and wrong with America, with our societal view of ourselves. Within Bill Ayers' account of such turbulent times and his perception of those times arises a clear awareness that freedom is both a decision and a responsibility. The various reviews I have read are inept, many seemingly suggest ongoing judgment of the means chosen by these freedom fighters, not the book itself. The book is spellbinding, revealing the toil, loss, hopes, dreams, and idealism of not only the times but of all of hidden America--nay, all of the world. I recommend the book to everyone as required reading and heartily have recommended this book to my college students. Within "Fujitive Days" is an awareness that we can, and should, consider making something of our lives.
Rating:
Summary: Maybe down in Mexico, or a picture upon somebody's shelf
Review: What's astonishing is that it took so long. History is, we can see, the retelling of another's story by the winners. As such, even the most intelligent people, over the last thirty years, have the vague image of clueless radicals blowing themselves to smithereens in a town house owned by someone's Daddy. The problem is that these were people who took their parent's best hopes very seriously and with a stunning lack of that irony which is now an ersatz for thought. Their parents were already aware, in 1956, that Stalinism was a dead end, and they did not need Irving Kristol to tell them so, for their parents did not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Their parents, along with the children, nonetheless asked why they had to live, minute to minute, under a sentence of nuclear death. They looked to the best of their children, people like Diana Oughton, who worked in Guatemela for the poor, for something like redemption. Was this wrong? What's not to like? I am named after a man sacrificed uselessly on the von Manstein line, and after WWII, Republicans and Democrats took the United Nations charter seriously because of this human sacrifice. Quite a number of elite parents supported their radical kids but felt their methods extreme. The parents failed to see the shadow of American life which was at that time appearing in its as-yet-ungentrified cities, cities which had never really recovered from the Depression. The brown shoes who followed Ayers, after all, might be labeled police and thereby benefit from police PR but any real policeman knows that they were bums with an agenda as is every other denizen of the city. And, it now appears, that ABSENT the weatherpeople, what you get is the USA Patriot Act and the threat, by the United States, to committ a war crime. Compared to the IRA and especially to United States international actions over the past fifty years, the violence of the Weatherman was genuinely surgical and not just represented as such: for in our "surgical" strikes we blame computers for errors...such as the destruction of a bomb shelter on Feb 13, 1991 by two American cruise missiles, which had been correctly programmed with the incorrect target. Like Billy Crystal in the Saturday Night Live sketch, we have learned how to selectively refuse moral agency, for when Billy Crystal's security guard rubs ground glass in his nostrils he says "I hate when that happens." When we bomb people we hate when that happens. It's just collateral damage, and, according to Madeleine Albright, "acceptable" and indeed made so by the ritualistic application of a label by a prestigious spokesperson. Precisely because the Weathermen had to take hands-on responsibility, at great danger to their lives, for their actions, they could oversee the technology every step of the way. Bill's Pentagon bomb, for example, was accompanied by a warning to clear the area and it quite surgically destroyed mainframe computers that were mismanaging the air war...in a way that is secretly satisfying to any ordinary computer programmer of that era, who in fact knew that the technology was a Potemkin village and completely unequal to the task. However, the end of thug Communism shows that even this type of low tech but accurate bombing is NOT the way to end the potential war in Iraq. The Internet instead allows people to gather in designated spots as they did world-wide on Feb 15 and this sends a more powerful message (the more primitive Internet and Xerography performed this function in Eastern Europe in the 1980s.) Here, Bill tells his own story and after being face-down, like the Jack of Hearts, for so many weary years of Yuppiedom and fraud, returns to the honky-tonk in answer to Big Jim, that Empty Suit that has had his way for thirty years with the environment and people's hopes. I was already struggling to find a career and support myself when in 1970, some of Bill's friends, possibly the big man himself, came on board the El with the strange eyes of extremity. They tried to not look upon us mere mortals with scorn but they were clearly in another world. The problem is that today, that same world, those now air-conditioned El cars, are filled with ads telling the losers who do not drive to work to clean their clothes and not have so many kids. The problem is that when the people on the CTA go to a college they can afford, their professors are not professors at all but drill instructors. They say Rousseau was wrong. Right or wrong, the problem is a logical dilemma. Once the old wanker of Geneva let the cat out of the bag, and said, clear enough, that man is born free but everywhere in chains, then whether or not man is born free but everywhere in chains, man is EITHER born free and able to live with others OR in an ultimately unmanageable struggle with others for survival. He is either a kid excited by a trip with Bill and Diana Oughton by a trip to workplaces to see work done, or a feral examination passer and workplace Stinky Pete, cruel towards the weak and subservient towards the strong. He either sighs, "they must know what they are doing" when confronted with the death of a million children in Iraq or he concludes that if man is born free but everywhere in chains, then something must surely be done and no, they don't have a clue and are as Dumb and Dumber, if more dangerous, than a drunken clown in a bar. Today, in America, the cabaret is quiet and a sign says "closed for repairs." But Big Jim is planning wastage in preference to sharing the proceeds of the late unlamented orgy. As in Rome on the night of Caesar's assassination, ghosts like Bill squeak and gibber in the streets, their words having been restored to meaning and truth. In the old play, a slave's arm was on fire, and they say, a man on fire got off the elevator on the first floor of the world trade center. The world has indeed changed, but instead of concluding we need a Fascist state to respond to an indefinable terrorism, many people may be rereading the history of the Weathermen and what they were about. Not to repeat their mistakes but to learn how to change things today.
Rating:
Summary: Young bomber, not dreamer
Review: Sanctimonious piece of garbage from from the [name] of his day...no, he was worse, he wanted to kill his own...and now he wants us to see what a martyr he and his ilk were and make money off it to boot. ... this book, then burn it. And don't miss Stud's "glowing young dreamer who tried to live elegantly" nauseating cover blurb...
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