Adapted from the bestselling grassroots history of the United States, the story of America in the world, told in comics form
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Since its landmark publication in 1980, A People’s History of the United States has had six new editions, sold more than 1.7 million copies, become required classroom reading throughout the country, and been turned into an acclaimed play. More than a successful book, A People’s History triggered a revolution in the way history is told, displacing the official versions with their emphasis on great men in high places to chronicle events as they were lived, from the bottom up.  Now Howard Zinn, historian Paul Buhle, and cartoonist Mike Konopacki have collaborated to retell, in vibrant comics form, a most immediate and relevant chapter of A People’s History: the centuries-long story of America’s actions in the world. Narrated by Zinn, this version opens with the events of 9/11 and then jumps back to explore the cycles of U.S. expansionism from Wounded Knee to Iraq, stopping along the way at World War I, Central America, Vietnam, and the Iranian revolution. The book also follows the story of Zinn, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as one of America’s leading historians.  Shifting from world-shattering events to one family’s small revolutions, A People’s History of American Empire presents the classic ground-level history of America in a dazzling new form.
A Leftist's Vision of America The far right has Ann Coulter. The far left has Howard Zinn. The book that this graphic version was based on, 'A People's History', was an interesting though biased book. 'A People's History' was obviously written from a leftist perspective with factual details cherry-picked to support the leftist point of view. However there was enough good information to make the thoughtful reader think and it was fairly well written. Better books on the same subjects abound, i.e., works written by authors with better historical credentials than Mr Zinn: 'The Other Americans' by Joel Millman and 'The Other America ' by Michael Harrington. What makes this graphic novel style version of 'A People's History' so terrible is that the use of drawings highlight the worst of Mr Zinn's arguments. It is like looking at political editorial cartoons drawn by your worst far left nightmare. His factual errors and manipulation of historical detail stand out when simplified by terribly idiotic graphics. What we have left then is a simplified version of Mr Zinn's previous book with all the good parts removed. The challenging and more thoughtful Howard Zinn does not exist in this graphic version. Instead we get the kind of person we sometimes see ranting on city street corners. If this is the real Howard Zinn, I am having none of it.
COMIC BOOK This was purchased for me by someone who knows I like Zinn but didn't realize that this is a comic book. Ok for kids, I guess, but not really necessary for any quasi-literate adult.
The Truth is Out There If you have always been the type of person to question the history textbooks you grew up with as a kid, this is your graphic non-fiction masterpiece. Adapted from Zinn's acclaimed grassroots history of the USA, this book is well illustrated and serves to select specific episodes and periods of our own countrys history that for some reason, we do not know correctly. There is much more to explore about history than to accept what is "commonly, automatically" assumed and that is propagated by the corporate news networks and ideologically-charged education censorship committees that select history texts at the state level...Howard Zinn opens the door towards the truth.
Poorly written, poorly drawn A speech bubble on the cover (pointing to nobody) states that this is a "Graphic Adaptation". Is this a new genre separate from Graphic Novels? Should you keep this on the shelf next to Alan Moore and Frank Miller or stash it next to Noam Chomsky? By graphic novel standards, the book is choppy and disjointed. The art looks amateurish, with the best being reproduced from old newspaper adds and cartoons. There are two writers. I assume Zinn wrote most of the text since many panels and inserts show him "lecturing" at a podium with a microphone. Did Zinn know you could tell a graphic story in first person without showing yourself every other panel? He did not use this self-important convention in his landmark "People's History" book, where his well researched history unfolds like a good story. It's not clear what Paul Buhle contributed, but we get a sample of his writing style in the foreword, which is all text. Did you know America was an empire? If you didn't, the word appears pretty much in every panel in the book, and twice in every sentence in the foreword. Even the Empire State Building makes an appearance to be sure you get it. Zinn's earlier, non-graphic book "A People's History" was controversial and definitely skewed towards Zinn's anti-American bias, but at least it was a good read. It was also truly a people's history as he did an amazing amount of research to tell the stories of those left out of previous American historical narratives. There is no people's history here. Just a lot of crude drawings and endless rantings filled with logical errors- everything bad that happened in the last 200 years happened because, you guessed it, America is an E-M-P-I-R-E. Zinn includes a small autobiography which explains his anti-Americanism: A Brooklyn cop hit him on the head at an anti-Fascist rally. He's been a self-proclaimed radical ever since. The Epilogue is titled "The Possibility of Hope", but I don't see any pictures of Obama. Perhaps we can hope that this is Zinn's only foray into the graphic novel field.
Better Than TV Not only is it in a fun comic book format, but the comics also include actual historic photographs and other documents.
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