[In the following review of The Zinn Reader, Wasserman applauds the hopeful tone of the essays in Zinn's collection.]

Howard Zinn, with characteristic innocence, introduces his pathbreaking essay The Southern Mystique, about breaking the color line in Atlanta in the 1950s, like this:

“I did not deliberately seek employment in a black college. I was only vaguely aware such an institution existed. …”

To say that Zinn is unique in the panoply of American writer-teacher-activists is to vastly understate his importance. “National treasure” comes closer to the truth. His People's History of the United States remains the most important leftwing narration of America's story yet published, with sales in the range of 225,000 and, after twenty years, still climbing.

Zinn's gentle style, evident throughout this welcome new compendium, is to present his case for radical change in terms of self-effacing human decency and understated common sense.

“Isn't it obvious,” he seems to ask, “that these things are wrong, and that we have to change them?” And isn't it equally obvious, he then adds, that the evils of racism, war, and class injustice will sooner or later fall away under the evolving power of nonviolent action?

When Zinn describes busting segregation in the Georgia capital, he writes with the wide-eyed tones of an intrigued, eternally optimistic neophyte who just happened upon a struggle for truth and justice and had no choice but to jump in. “A handful of Spelman students and faculty members, conscious of the unplanned and violent cataclysms that have shaken the world in this century, had been talking about the idea of deliberate social change,” he explains.

As his colleagues decide to make an issue of the lack of access for blacks to the public library system, Zinn is swept up in a quiet, beautifully managed movement to open those doors.

And open they do. So much else changes over the decades of Southern turbulence that the immensely complex “Southern mystique” is forever altered. “We are all magicians,” Zinn says. “We created the mystery of the South, and we can dissolve it.”

With beguiling grace, Zinn subtly dissects the burden of segregation and the movement to dismantle it. He was a participant in much of the early civil-rights movement, and his skill as a writer with access to key national journals was crucial in helping to spread the word.

Next, Zinn “somehow” finds himself amid the turmoil of the Vietnam War, and again takes on the role of author-teacher-activist. As a popular professor of political science at Boston University, his books and articles on that conflict had a major impact. Occasionally they made their way into the mainstream, as when he (briefly) wrote a column in the Boston Globe. Wherever his writings were published, they had that unique ability to balance rational thought with quiet rage.

Along the way, Zinn helped a new generation of budding historians rethink our national past, especially as illuminated by the social fireworks of the day.

What gives this particular grouping of his essays their special magic is that, taken in concert with his introductions, they comprise an autobiography of the man and a chronicle of his time.

In the essay “Growing Up Class-Conscious,” Zinn discusses his working-class background. His Austrian Jewish father, a member of Local 2 of the Waiters Union, “worked very hard for very little” as “a window cleaner, a pushcart peddler, a street salesman of neckties, a W.P.A. worker in Central Park.” Zinn's mother, a Siberian refugee, entered an arranged marriage, lost her firstborn to meningitis, and kept the family barely fed and constantly moving from tenement to tenement, often one step ahead of the rent collector.

“The roaches,” Zinn remembers, “were never absent, wherever we lived. … I never got used to them.” He also never accepted things the way they were. “The analysis of capitalism by Marx and Engels made sense,” he says. “My image of ‘a Communist’ was not a Soviet bureaucrat but my friend Leon's father, a cabdriver who came home from work bruised and bloody one day, beaten up by his employer's goons (yes, that word was soon part of my vocabulary) for trying to organize his fellow cabdrivers into a union.”

A bombardier in World War II, Zinn first embraced, then denounced the bombing of Hiroshima. His long, thoughtful essay on “Just and Unjust War” explores the logic of pacifism with a tone that confirms his commitments while making it equally clear he does not have all the answers.

Even without all the answers, this book is a healing read. Take two of these essays each night before bed. Soon, you'll feel restored, even hopeful. Then get everyone you know to repeat the process.