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A review by khornstein1
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
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.