American Empire in a nutshell

In addition to its growth through umpteen editions over the last 28 years, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has been sliced, diced, rearranged, and reimagined into documentaries, CD recordings, videos, and even theatrical productions. The book’s latest transmutation is A People’s History of American Empire, a large-format kind of graphic novel scripted principally by Dave Wagner and illustrated by Mike Konopacki. The book is “narrated” by a cartoon Howard Zinn and offers some biographical material about the historian’s battles over the years to present U.S. history from the bottom-up rather than from the traditional top-down. But most important, it dramatizes more than a century of U.S. imperialism and empire-building (from the massacre at Wounded Knee to the current Iraq debacle) in 263 quickly digested and (sorry, I can think of no better word) entertaining pages. This is a book quickly read, but even so, it’s amazingly thorough and well-referenced. And it’s an effective indictment of the liberal-corporate state from a very Libertarian Left perspective. A People’s History of American Empire is a book to devour, then pass on to your more receptive friends.