Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground And the Politics of Solidarity

The Weather Underground emerged from splits within the Students for a Democratic Society and for a period of time in the 1970s carried out a string of bombings that placed it in the front ranks of the American underground revolutionary organizations that developed out of the tumult of the 1960s. In this sympathetic, but not uncritical, history of the organization, Berger (a doctoral candidate at the U. of Pennsylvania) goes beyond the shallow psychological explanations of the group's activities that have characterized many earlier discussions by taking the evolution of the group's anti-imperial and racial solidarity politics seriously and judging their actions not from the perspective of the government, which understandably feared and hated it, but from the perspective of other organizations of the New Left and according to the criteria of the goals the organization set for itself. The result is a welcome addition to the scholarship of American leftism that shows the Weather Underground as serious and committed political activists grappling with the question of how privileged whites can most effectively fight imperialism and racism in solidarity with anti-colonial forces while avoiding vanguardism. However, the work is far from a hagiography and provides serious treatment of the group's problems with patriarchy and democratic failures, among other problems. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)