There’s a sweeping galvanization; a wave of pathos that I feel in Zinn’s writing. While the work itself reads more as a treatise with tremendous and questionable bent, I give it 5 stars first for the sheer breadth of coverage and secondly for a wonderful bibliography of source texts from the underrepresented, ignored, and downtrodden of this nation.

Most of the critiques and controversy lobbed at Zinn, from what I have seen, attack his very skewed retelling of events. Zinn himself acknowledges this, and responds with something I very much agree with: that objectivity is a ruse. All facts that are brought before you are the facts (and the commentary from those facts) based on what the presenter felt was important and worthy of your time. Other facts, and other perspectives on those facts, inevitably are left at the wayside. This isn’t because everyone is out to deceive you; it would simply take too long to have every person map out every perspective and every fact of a period and then write a cogent history through that. When people write history, they have implicit and explicit bias as to who they are choosing to read from, what sources they have available to them or know about, etc. Howard Zinn states very clearly that all he is trying to do is even the scales; with textbook upon textbook and thesis upon thesis based in the same perspective of the victors, the generals, the leaders and the businessmen, it can begin to feel like there aren’t any other perspectives. This book is intended to be their dark mirror; to leave out what they include and include what they leave out. Perhaps if we can find a way to hold all of these things in a creative tension we will be better able to forge a path ahead for all of us.