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Every aspect of a family’s life will seem normal to the small children within it; only hindsight can bring what was abnormal into relief. Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s earliest years were spent on the run from the FBI; his parents were members of the revolutionary Weather Underground faction, a group dedicated to the overthrow of the US government.

By the age of three he had been coached by his parents on how to recognise plainclothes officers on the street. “It was a bit like playing a game – a grownup version of dress-up or make-believe,” he recalls. He has fond memories of long night-time drives between safehouses. As well as fellow revolutionaries, his family encountered gangsters, IRA members and abortion activists, along with countless undocumented migrant workers.

In tandem with his child’s-eye view of life as a fugitive, Dohrn tells us the story of the Weather Underground and his parents’ role in it. The group was founded in 1969 by student activists outraged by atrocities against civilians during the Vietnam war. At first they called themselves the Weathermen, inspired by a Bob Dylan lyric (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”) until, mindful of the women it excluded, this was changed.

Dohrn’s mother, Bernardine, was their leader, and she was boss in her family, too. Dohrn idolised her. “I wanted to be like her,” he writes. FBI chief J Edgar Hoover was less enthusiastic, declaring her “the most dangerous woman in America”. Her image on the FBI’s wanted poster, young and tough-looking in a biker jacket, became iconic – though she despised the sexism behind much of the attention to her looks .

The Weather Underground wanted to highlight the brutal realities of the Vietnam war by bringing that conflict back to the US. They organised several days of demonstrations and rioting in Chicago in 1969, featuring pitched battles with police and more than 250 arrests, with 23 officers hurt and a large number of protesters injured – including six who were shot, though none fatally. After a bungled attempt to make nailbombs in 1970, during which three members blew themselves up alongside the Greenwich Village townhouse they were using, the group abandoned direct attacks against people. But they continued to take violent action. After phoning in warnings, they bombed the FBI headquarters, the Capitol, the state department and the Pentagon.

The damage was significant, but the US government was never in jeopardy. The Weather Underground was tiny, lacking any mass movement to back it up (though, enthusiastically antiracist, it allied itself to the more broad-based Black Panther party). Meanwhile, Dohrn’s parents faced a dilemma: how could they care properly for their children while simultaneously trying to upend the status quo? Bernardine’s love for her family took second place to her political commitment, which had to be maintained “even if her own children wound up as collateral damage”.

Amazingly, Dohrn’s parents got away with almost everything. His father, Bill Ayers, was never jailed, while Bernardine served only seven months between 1982 and 1983. Perhaps more amazingly still, Dohrn doesn’t hold any of it against them. Rather than following his parents into revolutionary politics, he has become a playwright and screenwriter. His book is filled with nuggets of counter-culture history: Dohrn’s parents sprang Timothy Leary from jail, for example. Then there is its compelling, episodic momentum, which the book owes to its origins as a podcast series, Mother Country Radicals. Where it trumps the podcasts is in the addition of Dohrn’s intimate narration and reflections on his liminal childhood, including its intertwining with the state of the nation – then, as now, mired in conflict. Despite his much . Delivery charges may apply.milder politics, he underscores the parallels between the triggers for his parents’ activism and our own times when he declares: “We are in a new era of American authoritarianism and racial reckoning.”

• Dangerous, Dirty, Violent & Young by Zayd Ayers Dohrn is published by Chatto & Windus (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.