Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn is the author of A People’s History of the United States. His latest book is Terrorism and War (Seven Stories Press, $9.95). Here he chooses his favorite books about power.

Power Politics by Arundhati Roy (South End Press, $12). Here, the brilliant author of the Booker Prize novel The God of Small Things uses her powerful pen, in several eloquent essays, to demonstrate, with chilling specificity, how “globalization” in India is destructive to human life and sensibility.

Richard Wright: The Life and Times by Hazel Rowley (Henry Holt & Co., $35). A magnificent biography, subtle and insightful, of the great black writer, author of Native Son. Wright was born in the Deep South, was involved with the Communist Party, struggled with it over the role of a writer-revolutionary, and became an expatriate in Paris. Rowley writes with style and grace, and her research on Wright is prodigious.

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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (Owl Books, $13). No statistical or polemical argument against “welfare reform” can match this devastating portrait of what happens to working women when they are forced into less than subsistence-wage jobs. Ehrenreich worked at such jobs for months before writing this account of her experience, her customary wit intact, her anger barely suppressed.

The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord by Ray Raphael (New Press, $27). About a little-known citizens’ takeover of government from the English in Massachusetts a year before Lexington and Concord. What is fascinating is the implication that independence from England might have been won without so much death and suffering, by a protracted nonviolent struggle.

The Condemnation of Little B by Elaine Brown (Beacon Press, $29). The former head of the Black Panthers here dissects the imprisonment of a 13-year-old black kid in Atlanta for a murder she is sure he did not commit. Brown boldly denounces the black community for not only abandoning the boy, but actively participating in his prosecution.

Last Refuge of Scoundrels: A Revolutionary Novel by Paul Lussier (Warner Books, $15). This is a hilarious spoof on the founding fathers. Lussier has actually done a huge amount of research on the Revolution, and his novel is an ingenious combination of fact and fiction, which manages to be outrageous and funny at the same time.