[In the following review, Isserman calls Zinn's autobiography “lucid and unpretentious.”]

Howard Zinn arrived at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, in August 1956 to take up duties as chair of the department of history and social science. He tells us in his memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, that he had not sought out a job at a “Negro college,” and he certainly had no sense that he was arriving in the Deep South just in time to witness the beginnings of the civil rights revolution. But the match between man and moment proved fateful:

The events of my life, growing up poor, working in a shipyard, being in a war, had nurtured an indignation against the bullies of the world, those who used wealth or military might or social status to keep others down. And now I was in the midst of a situation where human beings, by accident of birth, because of their skin color, were being treated as inferior beings. … I was open to anything my students wanted to do, refusing to accept the idea that a teacher should confine his teaching to the classroom when so much was at stake outside it.

In the next seven years Zinn welcomed the chance to move from sympathy to committed activism. His students, including such notables as Marian Wright and Alice Walker, were at the forefront of the southern Black student movement. Zinn himself was invited to join the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as one of two “adult advisers” (the other was Ella Baker). Zinn's reports from the civil rights battlefronts in Albany, Georgia, Selma, Alabama, and Greenwood, Mississippi were published in the Nation and the New Republic; his 1964 book SNCC: The New Abolitionists remains a classic of 1960s advocacy journalism.

Zinn's activism did not endear him to Spelman's autocratic president and led to his dismissal in 1963. Zinn then moved on to a position in the political science department at Boston University, where he would spend the rest of his career. The Boston area was a center of student protest against the war in Vietnam, and Zinn again found ample outlets for his talents as organizer and pamphleteer (his Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal quickly went through eight printings after its 1967 publication).

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train is, like most of Zinn's writings, lucid and unpretentious. Among its several virtues is the view it provides of the links between the Old and New Left. Zinn's initiation into radical politics came as a teenage Communist in Brooklyn. Disillusionment with the Soviet Union followed a few years later when he was serving as a bombardier with the United States Army Air Corps in Europe, and a fellow crew member lent him a copy of Arthur Koestler's The Yogi and the Commissar (1945). But Zinn remained an independent-minded socialist and, like many others who had left their party affiliations behind, found a way to put his radical beliefs into action when new opportunities arose in the 1960s.