Howard Zinn (A Life on the Left)

Published to great acclaim in hardcover, Martin Duberman’s Howard Zinn was described by Michael Kammen in the Los Angeles Review of Books as “biography at its best, written by a master of the craft and a man who has lived the activist life and combined that with serious scholarship and innovative teaching.” For the millions moved by Howard Zinn’s personal example of political engagement, here is a brilliant new biography of perhaps the most widely celebrated popular interpreter of American history and one of America’s most admired progressive voices.

“Profoundly moving and perfectly timed” (Blanche Wiesen Cook), “compulsively readable and elegant” (ForeWord), “engaging” (History News Network), and “thoughtful” (Reason Online), this fascinating account places Zinn at the heart of the signal events of modern American history—from World War II to the McCarthy era, the civil rights and the antiwar movements, and beyond. A bombardier who later renounced war, a son of working–class parents who earned a doctorate at Columbia, a white professor who taught at the historically black Spelman College in Atlanta—the author of A People’s History of the United States blazed a bold, iconoclastic path through the turbulent second half of the twentieth century. Drawing on the previously closed Zinn archives and illustrated with never–before–published photographs, Howard Zinn brings to life this towering figure—the people’s historian who himself made history, changing forever how we think about our past.