[In the following review, Rothschild contends that Zinn's autobiography presents an eloquent record of his activism in the civil rights and anti-war movements.]

Here's a personal favorite. This autobiography by the great activist and historian (who wrote the pioneering multicultural history. A People's History of the United States, long before the term “multiculturalism” was in vogue) provides an eloquent, personal account of the struggles for civil rights and against the Vietnam war, and a universal paean to protest and resistance.

At bottom, Zinn, like all humanitarian radicals, has nurtured throughout his life “an indignation against the bullies of the world, those who used wealth or military might or social status to keep others down,” he writes.

Zinn defies chronological and autobiographical order and jumps right into the action. In the first part of the book, “The South and the Movement,” Zinn discusses his days as chair of the history department at Spelman College in Atlanta, and his eventual firing for encouraging his students—including Alice Walker and Marian Wright—to participate in civil-rights protests. He follows his involvement in the movement to Albany, Georgia; Selma, Alabama; and Greenwood, Mississippi, where he encounters Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Julian Bond, James Farmer, and Bob Moses, as well as many unsung heroes whose praise he sings.

The second part of the book is simply entitled, “War.” It mostly discusses the many Vietnam protests which Zinn participated in, spoke at, or helped lead, and it recounts the trip he and Daniel Berrigan took to Vietnam in 1968 to bring back three American pilots whom the North Vietnamese government was releasing.

But the section begins with Zinn's discussion of his evolution as a pacifist, and this account took on a particular poignance for me, since it reminded me of many conversations I'd had with Erwin over the years on the very question of pacifism in the face of Hitler—a position I still have trouble accepting.

Zinn was a bomber in World War II, an ardent believer in the need to fight fascism by force of arms. One pivotal event came when Zinn and his fellow pilots were ordered to bomb a few thousand German soldiers who were trapped in Royan, France, a few weeks before the war ended. There was nothing to be gained militarily from the action: what's worse, the bombing mission used not the traditional weapons but “jellied gasoline.” Zinn recalls. “They didn't use the word, and I only realized long after the war that this was an early use of napalm.” Zinn also credits John Hersey's Hiroshima for transforming his view of “just wars.”

“The more I read, the more I thought about World War II, the more I became convinced that the atmosphere of war brutalizes everyone involved, begets a fanaticism in which the original moral factor (which certainly existed in World War II—opposition to a ruthless tyranny, to brutal aggression) is buried at the bottom of a heap of atrocities committed by all sides,” he writes.

“By the 1960s, my old belief in a ‘just war’ was falling apart, I was concluding that while there are certainly vicious enemies of liberty and human rights in the world, war itself is the most vicious of enemies. And that while some societies can rightly claim to be more liberal, more democratic, more humane than others, the difference is not great enough to justify the massive, indiscriminate slaughter of modern warfare.”

Zinn waits until Chapter 12 to give his personal background—son of Austrian Jewish and Russian immigrants, who settled in Brooklyn and never had any money. His mother managed the household: his father was a waiter and failed candy-store owner, who banged his head on the American dream but didn't make a dent.

Two events propelled Zinn into politics. The first occurred when he was ten, and the New York Post offered its readers a set of the complete works of Charles Dickens if they sent in the requisite number of coupons. Zinn's parents, who didn't know Dickens but knew their son liked to read, dutifully clipped and mailed the coupons. Zinn credits Dickens for arousing in him “a profound compassion for the poor.”

The other event occurred when Zinn was a teenager. Some of the guys he played basketball and football with in the neighborhood were communists, and they invited him to a demonstration in Times Square. Zinn went, and took his turn carrying a banner. Then the police came, some on horseback, and started smashing people with clubs. Zinn himself was knocked unconscious.

“From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy,” he writes, “I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country.”

Howard Zinn is an apostle of protest. “The tiniest acts of protest in which we engage may become the invisible roots of social change.” He uses his training both as a historian and an activist to preserve hope, even as the clouds gather, as they seem to be right now.

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness,” he writes on the last page of his book.

“And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”