
There’s no perspective, actually. This isn’t a book that offers an analysis. The author states from the start that he doesn’t want to take a position and he stays true to that, at least in the 80% of the book that I’ve read so far.
Days of Rage narrates what happened. It doesn’t evaluate or judge. The author is way to the Left compared to me, which I notice, for example, in his wholesale acceptance of the Left’s narrative of race relations in the US. But he abstains from offering any judgment. You could absolutely read the book and conclude that the Weathermen, the BLA, the SLA, and all the rest of them were completely justified in everything they did. Or you could conclude the opposite.
The value of the book isn’t in its perspective, which it pointedly avoids giving. It’s in the extraordinary amount of research that Burroughs did. You could find all this information yourself but you’d have to dedicate years to seeking out all the books, records, interviews, etc.
Some of the groups Burroughs describes are more interesting than others. I was bored by the chapters on Puerto Ricans and enjoyed the ones about the Weathermen a lot more. You might see it differently, of course. But please don’t worry that you’d get brainwashed into any system of beliefs by this book. Burroughs wanted to give a comprehensive narrative of what happened and he definitely achieved that.
