Bill Ayers
Tuesday, November 5th at 7 pm, Northtown Books welcomes back Bill Ayers to read and sign his new book, Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident.
This compelling sequel to Ayers’ Fugitive Days—published on September 11, 2001—describes the author’s chaotic life after he and his wife, Bernadette Dohrn, became the topic and target of conversation during Barack Obama’s first run for the presidency. Accused of being a domestic terrorist, Ayers, a popular professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, learned to navigate his new role as the nation’s “public enemy.” He begins his story in April 2008, when he was watching the presidential primary debate between Hillary Clinton and Obama with a dozen of his graduate students, and one of the debate moderators, George Stephanopoulos, asked Obama to explain his “friendship” with Ayers, a member of the radical 1960s Weather Underground. Ayers describes the nightmares that ensued: hate mail, death threats, cancelled lectures, being denied entry into Canada. He owns up to his activities as an “unrepentant terrorist” with the Underground but points out no one was killed or harmed: “Our notoriety, then and now, outstripped our activity.” Demonized and blacklisted, Ayers maintains not only his sanity but also his humor. When a reporter notes that he doesn’t look like a real Weatherman, Ayers laughs and asks her what a real Weatherman looks like. A wonderful homage to free speech.
“The legendary Bill Ayers is at his spellbinding best in PUBLIC ENEMY—a brilliant, spirited document of a revolutionary life in our not-so-revolutionary age. One of the most compelling insightful memoirs of the year.”
—Junot Díaz, author of This is How You Lose Her
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