You can't be neutral on a moving train

Acclaimed historian Howard Zinn has been at the center of the most important historical moments of the last thirty years, during which he has been admired both as a writer and as an important political and moral voice.

Author of the epic A People's History of the United States, Zinn here applies his historian's skills to the remarkable life he himself has led. In this inspiring, personal book - which works both as memoir and as popular history of an era - Zinn brings to life more than thirty years of American social history by telling the stories behind a politically engaged life.

Zinn grew up in the immigrant slums of Brooklyn and flew as a bombardier in World War II, and he writes about the ways both experiences helped shape a radical impulse, an opposition to war, and a passion for history. He writes about his first teaching job at Spelman College, where he worked with young civil rights activists including Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman.

He paints vivid, portraits of key moments and people throughout the South in the early 1960s, where he was a chronicler and active ally of the civil rights movement. He talks about his days as a leading antiwar protester, going to Vietnam with Daniel Berrigan and testifying in his friend Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers trial. He recalls imprisonments for civil disobedience, fights for open debate in universities, his love of teaching.

Running throughout this personal book is Zinn's charming, generous, engaged voice, as well as a message about history. You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train is Zinn's argument for hope - the stories of the people and events that inspire his faith in the possibility of historic change.