What makes a radical?

It took several months, but a copy of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, the autobiography of Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the son of late 1960s Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, found its way to me via the local library consortium this week. [I will continue to use Weathermen as a gender-inclusive term--not least because they themselves did.] It took me just two days to read through it. Zayd, now hearing 50, is an academic himself (I will use his first name to avoid confusion with his mother.) He has written a very well-researched book about his notorious parents, drawing on long talks with them and their co-revolutionaries and family members, as well as on very copious FBI files. Despite some minor splits which only someone my age would be likely to catch--James Chaney, who was murdered along with Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in 1964 in Mississippi, was a local Mississippi man, not another student from the North, and the Book of the Month Club in the 1950s did not distribute…