Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Life and Times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan

Brothers in Religious Faith and Civil Disobedience
By Murray Polner and Jim O'Grady

"Comprehensive and dramatically told."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"Conscientious research into many aspects of the Berrigans' lives ... assiduous interviewing of their colleagues in resistance and a finely etched portrait of their bleak youth in the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota."
-New York Times Book Review

"A remarkable new biography ... extensively researched and engagingly told."
-Philadelphia Inquirer

What transformed Daniel and Philip Berrigan from conventional Roman Catholic priests into "holy outlaws" - for a time the two most wanted men of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI? And how did they evolve from their traditionally pious, second-generation immigrant beginnings to become the most famous (some would say notorious) religious rebels of their day?

Disarmed and Dangerous, the first full-length unauthorized biography of the Berrigans, answers these questions with an incisive and illuminating account of their rise to prominence as civil rights and antiwar activists. It also traces the brothers' careers as constant thorns in the side of church authority as well as their leadership of the ongoing Plowshares movement - a highly controversial campaign of civil disobedience against the contemporary arms trade and nuclear weapons.

Murry Polner and Jim O'Grady provide a fascinating study of brothers linked by faith and the dreams of peace and social justice in a century bloodied by war, mass murders, and weapons of immense destructive power. It is, above all, an original contribution to modern American history that is sure to be widely read and discussed.

Murray Polner is an editor and author of No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran. He has written for the New York Times, The Nation, Commonweal, The Washington Monthly, and many other publications.
Jim O'Grady is a journalist and author of the biography Dorothy Day: With Love for the Poor .

Excerpt

...he received a three-year sentence in June 1967. At his court-martial Levy declared, very much in the spirit of the times, "It was just a prostitution of medicine. The medical art of healing was becoming the handmaiden of political objectives.") Also present were entertainers Country Joe and the Fish, Jerry Jeff Walker, Phil Ochs, Barbara Dane, and the Bread and Puppet Theater.