Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image the distortion remains.
Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do-only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans) and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian-Zinn posits-has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.įor Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. On the particularly inept Atlanta Braves, the author writes, “the chances of the Braves winning 81 games in 1976 looked about as likely as the Ramones selling a million copies of their debut album.”Ī must for everyone who still remembers when the White Sox wore shorts.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. The author tracks the seminal season’s progress-both on and off the field-with enough statistics and analysis to make even the most hard-core fans grin, and he makes the zany zeitgeist of the times irresistible. Epstein brings the entire sideshow to life with a narrative that has all the jump of a juiced-up home run ball smacked high over the center field wall. At the same time, it also provided enduring mavericks like Bill Veeck (1914-1986) with a national stage to work their last bits of baseball enchantment. The game was moving forward. That strange year in the history of the game allowed some unforgettable characters-e.g., the fiery Kansas City Royals third baseman George Brett and the late Detroit Tigers oddball hurler Mark “The Bird” Fidrych (1959-2004)-to soar straight into the hearts and minds of a nation desperate to escape darker days. Although they gave their best efforts, baseball owners learned that they could not stop the development of free agency or keep their stadium doors padlocked.
But no matter how successful they might have been reining in the free-flowing Afros and bushy beards that filled their clubhouses, they could not stop the evolution of the game. In 1976, it seemed that every old-guard skipper was on a vain crusade to trim back the mutton chops and Fu Manchus that had almost become de rigueur on the diamond.
A knuckleball ride through the wonderful and wacky year the nation celebrated its 200th birthday-and the national pastime changed forever.
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