Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Howard Zinn: A Radical American Vision by Davis D. Joyce, Noam Chomsky ISBN: 1-59102-131-6 Publisher: Prometheus Books Pub. Date: October, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.43 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Zinn on childrearing; and on being a WWII bombardier
Comment: One reviewer wants to know Howard and Roslyn Zinn's thoughts on
child-rearing. I don't know if they've published anything about
that, but their daughter has, and the Zinns probably had some
influence because Myla and her brother Jeff did not turn out too
badly. With her husband, Jon Kabot-Zinn, Myla has written a book
called Everyday Blessings, a detailed exploration of the meaning
of respectful child-rearing.
The reviewer also wants to know if Howard Zinn shared his
progressive ideas while serving in the Army Air Corps during
WWII. Someone should ask him that, but here's some context.
Zinn's writing is informed by study and personal experience. He
attended college after WWII on the GI bill, and earned a B.A.
from NYU in 1951 and Ph.D from Columbia in 1958.
In mid-April, 1945, he was a bombardier with the 490th Bomb
Group and, from the air, he participated in the napalm bombing
of Royan, the French seaside resort favored by Picasso. Nineteen
years later, Zinn visited Royan, on the ground, and scoured
public records in its town library. From documents and
interviews he gathered in Royan, Zinn was able to inform and
correct the historical account of the bombing of Royan written
by historians who were not there. Zinn's detailed account of the
circumstances of the bombing of Royan is published in The
Politics of History and also included in The Zinn Reader. The
story is an eye-opener, both from the perspective of what
happened after D-Day and in tracing the evolution of Howard
Zinn's ideas. If radical means detailed and in context, he's
radical all right. Zinn's public speaking and his history books
are enormously popular because he never forgets the story-
telling. He's funny, and makes good use of irony.
by Bonnie Britt
Rating: 5
Summary: Me and Joyce and Zinn
Comment: I became acquainted with Howard Zinn's writings while an anti-war activist in the late sixties and early seventies. I have read most of his books, numerous articles, and have seen several of his videotaped lectures. Historian Davis Joyce's biography, Howard Zinn: A Radical American Vision, reintroduced me to an "old friend" and enriched my understanding of Zinn's personal, political, and scholarly evolution. Joyce identifies early influences on Zinn, experiences as disparate as Charles Dicken's Tales of Two Cities, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Zinn's witnessing of segregation in the military, and of young communists being beaten by New York police while peacefully demonstrating. We learn how Zinn came to develop a fundamental insight about democracy-- that our cherished democratic institutions are no guarantors of justice and equality.
Just as Zinn is at his best when allowing disenfranchised and marginalized people to speak for themselves in his books, so does Joyce present critical explanations of major historical concepts using Zinn's verbatim words. This practice is perhaps best illustrated when Joyce allows Zinn to discuss the complex role of disobedience in a democracy, and when Zinn exposes the fallacies surrounding existing beliefs on "law and order." By weaving carefully chosen passages from Zinn's scholarly writings, from comments of his critics, and from meticulously selected personal anecdotes, Joyce is able to recreate the ambience within which Zinn engaged the critical issues of peace and justice, especially during the Vietnam/civil rights era. This talent of Joyce creates an excitement in the reader not unlike that evoked by a captivating novel. (Shouldn't all history evoke this type of excitement?)
Perhaps the greatest contribution of Joyce's book is to detail the historiographic issues which confront a radical historian such as Zinn. Joyce provides us with a tutorial on historiography. It is painstakingly illustrated, for example, by presenting the frequently dismissive treatment of Zinn by mainstream historians and in history journals. Zinn is labeled a pamphleteer by one critic, thereby casting him in the role of merely a passionate activist rather than a serious scholar. Joyce is clearly an ardent admirer of Zinn as a person and as a scholar but his assessment of Zinn is not an uncritical one. Joyce takes gentle issue with some of the more idealist notions of Zinn e.g. all prisons should be abolished.
It would be possible to gain a broad appreciation of the fundamental issues involving peace, justice and equality reflected in the corpus of Zinn's writings, by reading Joyce's book. He has captured well the essence of Zinn's works in this concise biography.
Joyce's book should be read by both the non-historian, (myself, a psychologist) and by the professional historian who has the courage to take an unblinkered glimpse at the constricted nature of the present discipline of history. This "courageous" historian would recognize the unacknowledged identification of much historical scholarship with existing power structures and with myopic interpretations of historical phenomena. It would expose the celebratory and triumphalist portrayals of history masquerading as dispassionate scholarship. Such a glimpse would reveal the propensity of historians to treat the orgins of war, injustice and inequality as a bloodless, scholarly exercise, an approach which eschews the role of existing institutions in perpetuating these, malevolent conditions.
Rating: 4
Summary: An account of the radical
Comment: This is the only biography of Mr. Zinn, the man whose witty prose and obsession with the downtrodden has earned him a place in the triumvirate of liberal establishmentism. A fine account an d a good biography especially for any former reader of Zinn or anyone interested in the revisionism of Zinn. This book sets out not only to tell the story of the Zinn revolution in American history but also to explain how Zinn is a 'true american' and not an 'anti-American'. Of course Mr. Zinn agrees with not one policy that America has ever taken. Mr. Zinn sympathizes with every foreign power or anyone who has ever attacked or killed Americans from King Phillip to Osama. Sadly Mr. Zinn's united states would look more like the former soviet union then the America we know. But politics aside this is a good biography if you sit on Zinn's side of the fence and if you don't then this is a good introduction to Zinnism.
 |
Title: Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project) by Noam Chomsky ISBN: 0805074007 Publisher: Metropolitan Books Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
 |
Title: The Sorrows of Empire : Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic [The American Empire Project ] by Chalmers Johnson ISBN: 0805070044 Publisher: Metropolitan Books Pub. Date: 13 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
 |
Title: A People's History of the United States : 1492-Present by Howard Zinn ISBN: 0060528370 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
 |
Title: Artists In Times of War and Other Essays by Howard Zinn ISBN: 1583226028 Publisher: Seven Stories Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
 |
Title: Radical Priorities by Noam Chomsky, C.P. Otero ISBN: 1902593693 Publisher: AK Press Pub. Date: 15 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
