Product Description

"Thank you, Howard Zinn. Thank you for telling us what none of our leaders are willing to: The truth. And you tell it with such brilliance, such humanity. It is a personal honor to be able to say I am a better citizen because of you."-- Michael Moore, director of the film Fahrenheit 9/11, and author of the New York Times bestseller, Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!

Find here the voice of the well-educated and honorable and capable and human United States of America, which might have existed if only absolute power had not corrupted its third-rate leaders so absolutely.-- Kurt Vonnegut, author of A Man Without a Country

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, is a major new collection of essays on American history, class, immigration, justice, and ordinary citizens who have made a difference. Zinn addresses America's current political/ethical crisis using lessons learned from our nation's history. Zinn brings a profoundly human, yet uniquely American perspective to each subject he writes about, whether it's the abolition of war, terrorism, the Founding Fathers, the Holocaust, defending the rights of immigrants, or personal liberties. Written in an accessible, personal tone, Zinn approaches the telling of U.S. history from an active, engaged point of view. "America's future is linked to how we understand our past," writes Zinn; "For this reason, writing about history, for me, is never a neutral act."

Zinn frames the book with an opening essay titled "If History is to be Creative," a reflection on the role and responsibility of the historian. "To think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past," writes Zinn, "is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat." "If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, and occasionally win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare."

Buzzing with stories and ideas, Zinn draws upon fascinating, little-known historical anecdotes spanning from the Declaration of Independence to the USA PATRIOT Act to comment on the most controversial issues facing us today: government dishonesty, how to respond to terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the loss of our liberties, immigration, and the responsibility of the citizen to confront power for the common good.

Considered a "modern-day Thoreau" by Jonathon Kozol, Zinn's inspired writings address the reader as an active participant in history making. "We live in a beautiful country," writes Zinn, in the book's opening chapter. "But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back."

Featuring essays penned over an eight-year period, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress is Howard Zinn's first writerly work in several years, an invaluable post-9/11-era addition to the themes that run through his bestselling classic, A People's History Of the United States.

Howard Zinn is a veteran of World War II and author of many books and plays, including the million-selling classic, A People's History of the United States.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26503 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 308 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Prolific author, WWII veteran and outspoken history/political science professor Zinn collects here almost three dozen brief, passionate essays that follow in the tradition of his landmark work, A People's History of the United States, taking up the cause of ordinary Americans fighting for social justice. Shunning conventional notions of American history, Zinn instead strives to decouple the country's history from its "mythology," in part by examining familiar contemporary concerns like class, race, civil liberties, immigration and the Iraq War. Indeed, this veteran's profound disillusionment with war suffuses the work, but a polemic against the Bush administration this is not; while Zinn scarcely shies from critiquing the governing elite, he prefers to focus on little-known or underappreciated historical episodes such as Revolutionary War soldiers driven to mutiny or 1999 World Trade Organization protestors in Seattle. He also revisits and reframes well-known events, including the Boston Massacre and the Holocaust, and invokes figures like union organizer Eugene Debs and Vietnam War protestor Philip Berrigan to point the way forward. Though his observations can be bleak, Zinn's belief that "history is powerful" and will "break down the credibility of the war makers" gives his book a great sense of hope. Readers seeking to break out of their ideological comfort zones will find much to ponder here.
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Jonathan Kozol, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The Shame of The Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America"
"Strong, incisive ... penetrating ... embraces the sweep of history."

About the Author
Howard Zinn is a U.S. historian and political scientist, whose philosophy incorporates ideas from Marxism, anarchism, socialism, and social democracy. He is the author of A People's History of the United States and the autobiography You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

Customer Reviews

Misguided Power
Zinn accurately points out that a disgruntled citizenry can overpower the guns and force of the largest governments. He correctly identifies problems with our current system of government; however his solutions are misguided at best.

He puts too much faith in the ability of government to fix problems and actually calls for more government intervention - apparently oblivious to the fact that government almost always exasperates the very problems it attempts to solve.

He riles against government subsidies to large corporations yet lauds government subsidies to "the disadvantaged". He is vehemently opposes a society segregated by class and in the same breath extols a welfare system that reinforces such segregation. He mocks the idea of a free market while never admitting that no such market has ever existed in this country due to government intervention.

As a historian, it should be obvious to Zinn that his utopian socialist society, while arguably pretty on paper, is disastrous in the real world. His solutions are not new and are based on ideals that have proven to be inefficient, if not tantamount to slavery.

A real solution to the issues he brings up is one that has not been tried and failed but one that is based on principal; one that completely opposes the initiation of force against everyone in society; one that reserves and restricts government power to defending the sovereignty of the nation and protecting it's citizen's inalienable freedoms.

Master Teacher Zinn
Ther are very few writters such as Teacher Zinn that can prose reality such as he does. Giving readers the truth is one thing, delivering it with such clarity is truley enlightening to say the least.
This text should be available, along with Howard Zinn's other works for every American school child in the middle and high school curriculum.
The truth will empower them and just maybe set us all free.
As "Flava Flave" of Public Enemy would declare, "do you know what time it is, boyee!" After reading Zinn's "A Power," you will!

a powerful message
this book was very informative, for me at least, a student of math.

however, as i think someone already mentioned, the prose is often lame and unimaginative.

examples:
"we are always in need of radicals who are also lovable, and so we would do well to remember eugene v. debs." - p. 231

"the world has been at war, again and again all through the twentieth century, and here it is, a new century, and we still have not done away with the horror of war." - p. 189

but this is really not important; what's important is zinn's overall message, encapsulated in the book's title. in fact one could argue that the dull prose makes it more accessible to laypeople (who are the backbone of social change, as zinn emphasizes time and time again) and easier to read.

and though there's a bibliography, there is no footnoting, as opposed to chomsky's books, which all seem to be extensively footnoted. i found this lack of rigour annoying and slightly unprofessional.

these are minor complaints. ultimately i give this book my highest recommendations. i'm a much better person for having read it, and it's a great book to awaken any american to the realities of the world he/she lives in.