As a World War II combat soldier, Howard Zinn took part in the aerial bombing of Royan, France. Two decades later, he was invited to visit Hiroshima and meet survivors of the atomic attack. In this short and powerful book, Zinn offers his deep personal reflections and political analysis of these events, their consequences, and the profound influence they had in transforming him from an order-taking combat soldier to one of our greatest anti-authoritarian, antiwar historians. This book was finalized just prior to Zinn's passing in January 2010, and is published on the sixty-fifth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Simultaneous publication this August in the U.S. and Japan commemorates the 65th anniversary of the USA's two atomic bombings of Japan by calling for the abolition of all nuclear weapons and an end to war as an acceptable solution to human conflict.
"His writings and speeches, coupled with the example of his brave activism, have inspired and changed the lives of countless people, young and old. Certainly much of his power lies in the seeming contradiction between his unflinching criticism of almost every established idea and his unflinching optimism, what he himself called his absurdly cheerful approach to a violent and unjust world."
Douglas Lummis, CounterPunch
"Occasioned by the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Zinn's final work (completed just before his death in January 2010), combines a discussion of the horrors of atomic warfare with a glimpse at the carnage in Royan, which included the deaths of over 1,000 civilians in one of the first uses of napalm, Zinn's call to reject disproportionate violence in war remains unalloyed a
Brendan Driscoll, Booklist
"The late Howard Zinn's new book The Bomb is a brilliant little dissection of some of the central myths of our militarized society."
