In a recent post, I mentioned the announcement that Howard Zinn is at work on a comic-book offshoot of his million-selling history of America. Zinn is in the news yet again. The Organization of American Historians met in Boston last week, and held a "town hall meeting" in honor of the former BU professor.

Released almost a quarter-century ago, Zinn's book is, at the hour of this post, the 261st bestselling book on Amazon. It not only still sells, but generates fresh controversies as well. In the forthcoming issue of the publication Dissent, historian Michael Kazin blasts Zinn's magnum opus as "history as cynicism."

When I wrote my review for frontpagemag.com, my hope was that some historian would read it and be inspired to give A Peoples' History the professional critique it deserves. Though I hardly think Kazin read my 5,000-word review, I am heartened to see that Zinn's book is getting the kind of vetting it should have received in 1980--from a leftist professor no less.

Zinn's basic thesis is "better suited to a conspiracy-monger's Web site than to a work of scholarship," Kazin's scathing review holds. Ultimately, Kazin judges the simplistic left versus right, good versus evil script of A Peoples' History as damaging to political progressives. It not only marginalizes the Left, but blames its failures on a grand conspiracy rather than any fixable internal problems. Kazin observes: "Zinn cares only about winners and losers in a class conflict most Americans didn't even know they were fighting."

While Kazin criticizes Eric Foner for praising Zinn's book in his New York Times Book Review piece on it in 1980, Foner's evaluation of A Peoples' History was more tepid than Kazin lets on. Amidst some praise, which the book's publishers exploitatively parse on its dust jacket, Foner complained that various minority groups "appear either as rebels or as victims" to Zinn. "The strength of 'A People's History,' therefore, is also its weakness," the 1980 review concluded. "Written to counter a prevailing tradition, it does not, perhaps inevitably, transcend it."