Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla

Jeffrey J. Cormier is an assistant professor of sociology at Queen’s
University.

Ann Hansen spent seven years of a life sentence for her part in Direct
Action, a militant urban guerrilla group active during the early 1980s
in Canada. Supporting themselves through various armed robberies in and
around Vancouver, the group was best known for its bombing of the
Cheekeye-Dunsmire hydroelectric substation, then under construction by
B.C. Hydro. Several months later the group traveled to Toronto and
planted a truck bomb in front of the Litton Systems Plant where
components for Cruise Missiles were built. Although no deaths resulted
in either of their direct protest actions, the latter bombing did manage
to seriously injure several Litton employees. In a separate set of
protest actions, Hansen took part in the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade, an
organization that firebombed several Red Hot Video shops in Vancouver in
protest of the chain’s distribution of violent pornography.

This book is supposed to be a memoir of Direct Action’s many months
of activities and the philosophy, rationale, ideology, etc. behind using
direct militant action against government and corporations. To do this
Hansen relies on her memory, court transcripts, media reports, and
police surveillance documents to reconstruct her story. But at times it
reads more like a novel than a memoir. Hansen often gives excruciating
detail about tangential episodes, people, and ideas. The book’s
strongest sections are the epilogue and appendixes, which contain the
three communiqués sent out by the group after the bombings as well as
Hansen’s statement to the court during her sentencing.