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Ann Hansen, (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2001)
ALTHOUGH 20TH-CENTURY Canada was hardly Lower's "peaceable kingdom," political violence by non-state actors has been sufficiently rare that this account of a group of self-styled urban guerillas is bound to be of interest to students of social movements and the left. The author and four others comprised a group calling itself "Direct Action" that engaged in a series of politically motivated bombings in 1982. Arrested in January 1983, they received sentences of between ten years and life (Hansen herself); all were out on parole by 1990. Based on her own recollections, police documents made available to defence lawyers, and newspaper articles, the book tells the story of the three years during which Hansen changed from a graffiti-painting revolutionary into a gun-toting urban guerilla.
This does not pretend to be a scholarly book, and the publisher has provided terms for its review as "Politics, True Crime, Autobiography." (back cover) The 160 pages of Part II, "Going Underground," are the most autobiographical, as we learn there about her involvement in prison rights and international solidarity movements, growing interest in urban guerillas, support work in Paris for Germany's Red Army Faction, and move from Toronto to Vancouver, where she joined a small network of anarchists. We follow the emerging urban guerillas as they acquire the skills and resources of their trade -- the skills (of car theft, weapons handling, bomb-making) mainly from books, pamphlets, and magazines such as Soldier of Fortune and Guns and Ammo; the resources (guns, dynamite, money, vehicles, false identities) mainly through theft, including their first armed robbery. Hansen's motives emerge as a mixture of idealism, a quest to realize a romanticized self-identity as...