Fugitive Days: A Memoir by Bill Ayers Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Fugitive Days: A Memoir
Book Review: Let's you be there now!
Summary: 4 Stars
My Ayers book is an excellent memoir of the times.He captuers the flavor of SDS and the Weatherman exactly as it was for those of us who lived it. There is little in the way of analysis and apologizes here, and that is as it should be. This book does not attempt place the past in the context of today. It is a memoir and as such has no need to do that.If you want to want to experience the feelings just as they were in those days then this is the best book to date on the subject. It move at the same pace as the events did or at least felt like they were moving at the time.
Book Review: Pitiful Self-Justification For Violence
Summary: 1 Stars
Bill Ayers is not a revolutionary. He is a coward with virtually no leadership skills. A true leader (who wants to make positive social change)reaches out to develop relationships with those they oppose. Once you develop these relationships, you then have the power to influence them for the greater good (of society). In the Art of War, the philosophical writer believes that the greatest tool a leader has to build a strong army is to bring those with opposing viewpoints together for understanding. Put in another way, when you can have simultaneous understanding between those with opposed viewpoints, you have the greatest tool for building a strong army (social change). Bill Ayers never reached out to those he opposed. Instead, he went "underground" and blew up empty buildings which caused the American taxpayers even more suffering. The fact that he got away with his crimes makes it more disheartening for those of us who continue to work hard and believe in the rule of law. His book is rubbish and belongs next to other titles written by ego-maniacs.Book Review: The Ace Ventura of the ramparts
Summary: 1 Stars
(...)Okay: what do we have here with this book? The subtitle identifies it as "A Memoir," but that's not a very good generic fit. How many memoirs have you read wherein the author keeps pestering you every 5 pages with reminders that his account of his own past cannot be trusted or believed. Ayers does this with an interminable succession of italicized passages, each of them a high-flying poetic meditation on the gossamer nature of memory, the impossibility of accurate recall, the slipperiness of subjectivity, etc etc etc.
Ayers' first such declaration, on page 7, cannot be quoted here (...). Let us paraphrase it thus: "Memory is an Oedipal coefficient." On a regular basis throughout the book, Ayers renews his license to lie and dissemble with more and more and more of this italicized gibberish: "Memory is a house of mirrors, a land of make believe. . . . a delicate dance of desire and faith, a shadow of a shadow. . . . a way of forgetting, a way of filtering. . . . Memory is a marvel, quick as a monkey and just as silly. . . ." and so on and so forth. A solid 5% of this book is dedicated to rendundant declarations concerning the ineffable elusiveness of memory. [By the by, the above quotations are a fair sample of the cloyingly precious "fine writing" that permeates the book. ] Never for a second would it occur to the author that there are sources of information out there in the world in relation to which the veracity of his unreliable memory can be checked and controlled. It's indicative of the solipsism of Ayers' mind that not a single other work on the 1960s is cited in his self-serving --what shall we call it, autohagiography? Naughtobiography? It's obvious that Ayers feels that these repetitive prose-poems on the unreliability of memory place him and his book in a higher category of honesty than the run-of-the-mill memoirist, who might deny the influence of subjectivity. They don't. There's more accuracy, more honesty in the average "as-told-to" showbiz autobiography than there is here.
Anyway, true to his promise, Ayers omits from his narrative anything that might be of genuine interest or import to an understanding of his life and times. He's clearly gloatingly unrepentingly proud of his past (& especially of all of the Movement babes he shagged --oh boy do we hear a lot about this) but at the same time he evades any actual discussion of the criminal acts that are the basis of his sick claim to fame. Ayers can't actually talk about any of the bombings and robberies and stuff, not just because memory is a blind gerbil in swimming in a sea of cold pea soup or whatever, but because his persisting code of revolutionary omerta forbids it. "In our conflict," writes the tenured tough guy , his intact, " we don't talk; we don't tell. We never confess." Okay, so shut up, already.
There are so many genuinely interesting topics Ayers could have told us about: the internecine sectarian power struggles among various members of the Weather cult. The details about how he used family clout and money to buy himself out of trouble with the law. The process whereby he and alpha Weathergirl Bernadine Dohrn made the transition from the hard-rutting "Smash Monogamy" sexual politics of "the Movement" to bourgeois wedded bliss in Hyde Park. How's that work, Bill? Inquiring minds want to know. And hey, what kind of a family did Bill and Bernadine, erstwhile admirers of the Manson Family, ultimately spawn? On the latter subject, Ayers is characteristically coy: "We had our ways and weirdnesses, but that, too, is another story." More to the point, I'd guess, is that its a story that wouldn't easily accomodate the author's Ace Ventura-like vanity. Don't hold your breath for a more revealing sequel.
Here's what you ultimately get: Ayers' self-assessment of himself as a pretty neat and righteous guy. Oh sure, he admits to a few foibles ---"pride and loftiness"---- but these, he would have us know, should be measured against his many virtues: "confidence, passion, optimism and hope, some humor" (p. 284). Hey, what's a little "loftiness" mixed in with a cornucopia of traits like that? Another big pay-off is this: "We crossed the line and came back" (p. 263). Ayers is talking here about the fact that he and his Weatherpals used to plant bombs, but later they stopped. It would never occur to this egotist that it is not for him to say whether or not he and his accomplices have "come back." Let's ask the family of a certain slain Brink's security guard about that, shall we?
I don't know what else to say about this thoroughly diseased book. I read it with clenched teeth. My reaction had nothing to do with politics, except insofar that Ayers' manifest personality disorder is characteristic of the sectarian left.
Book Review: The views of a historian.
Summary: 5 Stars
Since its release, the arguments surrounding this book have been exhaustive. What none of these critics seems to be able to see is that this is a book of one man's life. This memoir, like all memoirs, outlines the major events of the author's life, and how those events led and transformed his life. Fortunately for us, Bill Ayers has chosen to share his experiences with us. Never in the course of the book does the author judge what he did, he merely explains why he thought such doings were a good idea at the time. To a historian such an account is invaluable. Here is a man who for much of his life lived outside of mainstream American society, fighting against what he perceived to be its inflexibility and racism. He gives a first-hand account of part of America's history that is being systematically forgotten. I would like to add that one does not need to believe that Bill Ayer's fight was just in order to find this account interesting and provocative. Furthermore, the author, realizing the most fundamental rule of historiography, even explains that his memories are subject to his own biases and interpretation, being inciteful enough to see that no one's memory, even his own, is precise. This is a book which, love it or hate it, everyone should read.Book Review: Then happy is the land that needs no heroes.
Summary: 1 Stars
If Billy and Bernardine are "American heroes," then I would next like to nominate Charles Manson for canonization too. Ayers doesn't mention it in his weasel-worded, supremely evasive pseudo-memoir, but back in the day all the Weatherpeople thought very highly of Manson, embracing him as a fellow revolutionary. And in fact, the Weather cult and the Family had quite a bit in common, ideologically speaking. They both were banking on the idea that American blacks were about to rise up and slaughter their white oppressors in an apocalyptic race war. (Tom Hayden famously paraphrased this doctrine thus: "Get a ______ to pull the trigger.")This belief underlay the famous Manson murders: Charles hoped that "the Establishment" would blame black people and come down hard on their community, thus igniting the event he called "Helter Skelter." A key difference between Ayers/Dohrn and Manson, however, is that Manson came by his insanity honestly. He was born at the very bottom of the social scale, grew up in penal institutions, was sexually and physically abused in every manner imaginable. The poor slob wasn't even given a name at birth.
Bill Ayers, on the other hand, grew up with silver spoons up every orifice of his body. He went to the best prep schools; was given every privilege and perk imaginable. And that makes him something less than Manson.