Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I think this is a useful book, and one which I wish I could like better. I first read Zinn’s book when it came out and thought it was execrable. I wrote a very harsh and technical review of it for the friend who sent it to me, which (in that pre-computers era) has been lost in the mists of time and moving. Grabar does a credible job of showing Zinn’s poor scholarship, biased (and often poorly researched and sourced) sources, clear Communist Party (not just academic Marxist) world view and set of ideas. My concern is that she piles it on so heavily that she shades her critique to include the trivial and sometimes errs in her own credulousness to sources on the right. It may be the pressures of getting a full length book, and it may be the (very) conservative publishing house. (But note, Regnery publishes a lot of very credible conservative work and scholarship). I’d recommend the book, however. She goes well beyond (for a non-scholarly audience) Oscar Handlin’s classic 1980 take down/review in The American Scholar, and brings to bear a pretty solid understanding of the post-collapse of the Soviet Union learning about the Communist movement in the US and Zinn’s own participation in it. That alone is worth the price of admission. Her stuff on Vietnam is more marginal, because that situation was more nuanced than she seems to think. For the record, I think Zinn’s book, considering the influence it has had, is probably the most pernicious book written in English in the 20th century. Both of my kids were exposed to Zinn's People's History in high school and I went around and around with the faculty about Zinn. Even gave them copies of Handlin's review - which none of the had read. My own antitdote for my kids at at the time was to have them read the two volumes Morison, Commager & Leuchtenburg (good liberals all!) The Growth of the American Republic, which represents a solid '60s style consensus interpretation and which is reasonably well-written.