SOURCE: Buhle, Paul. “He Shall Not Be Moved.” Nation 259, no. 17 (21 November 1994): 623-25.

In the following review of Zinn's autobiography, Buhle asserts that You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train is not Zinn's best work, but insists that it is nonetheless an engaging and entertaining book.

I have always imagined that historian Howard Zinn somehow took part in the multitudinous radical movements of the 1840s-50s, campaigning for abolition, women's rights, dress reform and nonviolence. A rare Jew among Yankees and African-Americans, he would have commanded the platform with figures like Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, held his own against hostile audiences and broadcast the prospects for universal freedom. Something about Zinn's style and bearing suggests the prophetic profile so common to radicals in those days and so rare in our own.

Actually, Zinn grew up in a blue-collar Brooklyn family in the 1920s and '30s...