Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian.

• Position: Brief Article

Howard Zinn, the eminent author of A People's History of the United States, has collected in this slim volume the essays he has written over a number of years for such journals as Civil Liberties Review (now defunct) and Z magazine; the transcripts of a radio interview and a few public lectures, and even an angry op-ed-style piece about the 1986 bombing of Tripoli, which found no takers among the nation's newspaper editors. He deals as well with topics as diverse as the First Amendment, higher education, and "just and unjust wars." I.F. Stone's late-in-life study of Socrates provokes Zinn into a reexamination of Plato. And he thinks he knows why Marx once said, "Je ne suis pas un Marxiste": There was this young German hero-worshipper who...