This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. As the child of parents who were radicals in the 60s and

revolutionaries in the 70s, my guest Zade Ayersdorn spent his early years underground,

with parents who were on the run disguising themselves with fake identities. Zade Ayers-Dorn's name

gives you a sense of his story. His mother, Bernadine

Dorn, was a leader of the 60s radical student group, SDS, Students for a Democratic Society,

which opposed the war in Vietnam and racism. She and Zade's father, Bill Ayers, helped found the more

militant faction that split off from SDS in 1969

and became the Weather Underground, committed to armed resistance against the government.

For years, Bernadine was on the FBI's ten most wanted list.

Zaid is also named after Zaid Malik Shikur, the Minister of Information for the New York Black

Panthers, who designed some of their clothes as well as their disguises and was killed after a

traffic stop that ended in a shootout with police in 1973. The Weather Underground and the

Panthers had been working together. In protest against the war in

Vietnam and against racism, the Weather Underground planted bombs in empty police cars, the Pentagon,

and other places they considered symbols of the opposition, giving advance warning to people

in those buildings to evacuate.

In Zay's new memoir, he wrestles with the contradictions between his parents' commitment to their cause and how they and other members of the underground left their children, quote,

unwilling casualties of their parents' war.

The book is titled Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, a fugitive family

in the Revolutionary Underground. It's his family story and the larger story of the radical

underground, based on personal experience, as well as interviews with his family, former

members of the Weather Underground, and the Black Panthers, and children, as well as Bernadine Dorn's FBI files.

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