Jonathan Lerner's favorite books about what drives people to adopt radical politics—and even embrace violence.

This is an angry book.

Rereading it made me angry all over again. Much about U.S. race relations has improved since Baldwin's essay was published in 1963. But rereading it now, after six decades when I myself have sometimes been active in anti-racist efforts, I was stunned by how penetrating and accurate his critique remains, and how enduring the depredations he described back then have proven to be.

And yet! And yet, the writing is suffused with empathy and, disarmingly, even with love. Discrimination and inequality made Baldwin a militant, but he never turned mean and never embraced violence. He is a model of how to stay humane.

This novel made me uneasy.

I loved Rosa Burger's character, sympathized with her dilemma, and didn't want to see her harmed. And because she faced agonizing moral choices, I had to question my own. Rosa's parents, anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, were imprisoned; both died in jail. Their cause was just, their sacrifices laudable. I never doubted my own opposition to apartheid, but that was easy from a distance; I can't know what I would have done if I had lived there.

How can I judge Rosa for choosing her own path, even a frivolous one, away from both politics and her troublesome country? And can I judge her if she later goes home, becomes active, and risks her parents' fate? But then I wonder, are people who replicate their parents' life choices inauthentic? Shouldn't they think for themselves?

A badly disciplined, poorly educated gang of young Nepalis, part of a separatist guerrilla insurgency, reminded me of my militant leftist former comrades.

If the Nepali boys' self-image borrowed from action-hero films, ours took inspiration from political tracts (and movies), perhaps more literate but no less cartoonish. (A real insurgency in Nepal, in the 1980s, failed. Ours, in the U.S. in the 1960s and '70s, failed too.)

The guerrillas provide one of the novel's interconnected story lines and sympathetic sets of characters. The place is a dreamily lush Himalayan locale. But the "inheritance," the legacy of colonialism—class division, poverty, alienation—renders it grim and all of its inhabitants' dreams perpetually frustrated. 

I learned a lot about our damaged environment from Earth Day, first observed in 1970, and the mostly peaceful efforts it catalyzed. 

This novel, published in 1975, made me picture a different, militant green activism. Its characters go around torching billboards and smashing machinery. They're also endearingly ridiculous individuals. The book is a laugh-out-loud farce, which seemed to render their violence harmless and fun.

Violent action seemed appealingly bold to me back then. But—inspired by Abbey?—in the decades since, there has been a fair amount of what's called ecoterrorism. It's been a long time since I've cheered that on. I still find the book a romp, but it's fiction, not a template for saving the planet.

Didion's inability to make sense of America in the fracturing, turbulent mid-century years struck me as spookily familiar.

Many of the essays in this collection are personal, about herself; she was a cool and incisive observer, not a participant. But the pervasive atmosphere of disaffection and alarm she depicts drove many, including me, to take enormous risks for ill-conceived reasons.

She profiles one dreamer who found it shockingly easy to abdicate responsibility for making delusional choices: Linda Kasabian, who joined the murderous Manson Family, conned by its leader's charisma, and his promises of love and some vague idyllic future, into forgetting that actions can have fatal consequences.