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sageofthe6pack's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
i’m glad he addresses the lack of latino and lgbt perspective in the afterword, because this was my biggest qualm with the book. otherwise, a phenomenal record of american history, very interesting to see how history repeats itself over and over again, and how that’s reflected in the present day with the pro-palestine movement
khornstein1's review against another edition
3.0
OK, so I tried to write before that I consider myself to be pretty liberal. But I'm also a thinker. And I've voted Republican in some local elections.
Another disclaimer: I'm not a historian or even a "history buff." I do however, have a lot of interest in history, interest that's become stronger in recent years.
This is a hard book to get through. For one thing it's 768 pages! Which would work if it were a text book...or less meandering. Fortunately, I was on a vacation with a lot of downtime.
Zinn, who I think is an anarchist, begins by saying that there are stories in history that have never been told, because history is written by those in power. Right on!
So I'm waiting for the stories...and some of them are quite good. The sections of the book that talk about the civil rights era and soldiers in Vietnam and women's role in Colonial America are interesting and well-written and you can get through them easily. And I was truly fascinated about the idea of the American Revolution being fought mostly for profit motive on all sides--a new angle.
Then there are sections that bang on about the labor movement...also very important I might add, but are composed of brief paragraphs chockablock with dates, names and places, kind of like a badly developed 6th grader's report...it's neither interesting narrative, nor does he bother to expand on the incidents and tie them back to his original argument, which really gets old after 768 pages.
And then some of his ideas are just kind of bizarre. Like nobody cared about the Holocaust and WWII was again just about profit and loss. And that the civil rights era was really about class conflict and very little else, i.e. all racism has a profit motive, which is a popular idea but I don't buy it...racism springs from a number of places in the human psyche.
I am also wary of efforts to throw out all the dates and names of people in power as many in academia have done in trying to make history more balanced--it makes things just as skewed. We study people who were in power not necessarily because they were "great" but because things happened because of them.
I had a tremendous urge to re-write this book, balancing the two sides of history and throwing in a timeline!
I would recommend reading excerpts.
Another disclaimer: I'm not a historian or even a "history buff." I do however, have a lot of interest in history, interest that's become stronger in recent years.
This is a hard book to get through. For one thing it's 768 pages! Which would work if it were a text book...or less meandering. Fortunately, I was on a vacation with a lot of downtime.
Zinn, who I think is an anarchist, begins by saying that there are stories in history that have never been told, because history is written by those in power. Right on!
So I'm waiting for the stories...and some of them are quite good. The sections of the book that talk about the civil rights era and soldiers in Vietnam and women's role in Colonial America are interesting and well-written and you can get through them easily. And I was truly fascinated about the idea of the American Revolution being fought mostly for profit motive on all sides--a new angle.
Then there are sections that bang on about the labor movement...also very important I might add, but are composed of brief paragraphs chockablock with dates, names and places, kind of like a badly developed 6th grader's report...it's neither interesting narrative, nor does he bother to expand on the incidents and tie them back to his original argument, which really gets old after 768 pages.
And then some of his ideas are just kind of bizarre. Like nobody cared about the Holocaust and WWII was again just about profit and loss. And that the civil rights era was really about class conflict and very little else, i.e. all racism has a profit motive, which is a popular idea but I don't buy it...racism springs from a number of places in the human psyche.
I am also wary of efforts to throw out all the dates and names of people in power as many in academia have done in trying to make history more balanced--it makes things just as skewed. We study people who were in power not necessarily because they were "great" but because things happened because of them.
I had a tremendous urge to re-write this book, balancing the two sides of history and throwing in a timeline!
I would recommend reading excerpts.
guywantread's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
sam2085's review against another edition
4.0
No longer a necessary read thanks to the proliferation of alternative histories in part inspired by this work. Nonetheless, an excellent overview of American history.
c_rabbit's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
2.0
Lots of interesting information throughout that is food for thought and need my fact checking follow up since i didn’t hear the citations that back up the audiobook version.
meanstoakenz's review against another edition
medium-paced
4.5
Gigantic read that tries to balance closeups of individual events with the larger narratives they draw. Does a decent job of trying to cover the same time periods from different peoples' perspectives (at least in the edition I read). Nearly every chapter could be it's own book, which means that you're definitely just getting a sweeping overview. Zinn has a few odd opinions, like his anti-nuclear energy stance (which made more sense in the wake of 3 Mile Island), and definitely has some biases to certain leftist individuals & organizations over others. There's a now-tragic optimism in later chapters about the 60s/70s and especially the (added in later editions) early 90s.
kvanhook92's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
slow-paced
5.0