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!

"This strong, incisive book by Howard Zinn provides us with a penetrating critique of current U.S. policies and embraces the sweep of history. Zinn's inspired voice sets him apart which is why so many of us look to Howard as a modern-day Thoreau. As always with Zinn's work, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress leaves us with the faith that citizens have what it takes to confront power and to reverse the dangerous and unjust acts of our government."
-- Jonathan Kozol, author of The Shame of The Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

"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

"Howard Zinn is a unique voice of sanity, clarity and wisdom who reads history not only to understand the present but to shape the future. Profoundly insightful A Power Governments Cannot Suppress should be read by every American, over and over again."
-- Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine, author of The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right

"This brilliant new book-like Howard Zinn's presence, and his whole life, is the best possible antidote to political despair. Read it, and rejoin the struggle for a human world and a foreign policy that's good for children."
-Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and is author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

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. For more information about Howard and his speaking schedule see www.citylights.com

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #146001 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-01
• Original language: English
• 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Strong, incisive ... penetrating ... embraces the sweep of history." -- Jonathan Kozol, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The Shame of The Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America"

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

Powerful prose dotted with history lessons
Once again I am enthralled by Zinn's masterful writing, collected here in 271 pages of prose that will keep you glued!

Peppered with bits of history as made by ordinary people, each chapter of this book contains a short essay by Howard Zinn dealing with topics of social injustices such as war, capital punishment, and violence of capitalism and the active reactions by ordinary people to bring attention to the problem and to drive change at the grass-root level from the founding of America to present day.


EXCERPT:
"Our culture--the media, the educational system-- tries to crowd out of our political consciousness everything except who will be elected president and who will be on the Supreme Court, as if these are the most important decisions we make. They are not. They deflect us from the most important job citizens have, which is to energize democracy by organizing, protesting, sharing information, and engaging in acts of civil disobedience that shake up the system."


The theme is the same: Many, many everyday people, whom abused in some way (or seeing the abuse) by the artificial entity that is government and its many bureaucratic arms of privilege/commerce/imperial-driven warfare against the majority class of the subjugated, the poor and those simply born of a different nationality, race or sex; yet are not afraid to face down the police, the military, the farcical legal system or neighbors blinded by patriotic fervor to bring justice to those unrepresented by the 'system' or the media.

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!