This book will make you angry. Zinn compiles and occasionally writes essays and stories about real life civil rights violations and struggles in the Boston area during the 60s and early 70s. While most of the material feels dated (I'm not up on the current state of affairs in Boston's police dept., courts, hospitals, etc., but I imagine they're nowhere near as barbaric as they were 40 years ago), it still inspires horror at the level of racism, sexism, and class-ism that existed just a short time ago, and supposedly after the civil rights struggle was already "won." Zinn has a gift of putting a personal face on the theoretical and ideological concepts of justice and constitutional rights, a gift on display here just as in his masterwork A People´s History. My only criticism is that his solutions rely pretty heavily on idealism. Lauding the few reforms he narrates, he is quick (and accurate) to point out that all reform victories are basically worthless without changing the system that engenders such exploitative relations between its members in the first place. His sparse suggestions of how this can be brought about are lacking in number and unconvincing in content (perhaps because it's an impossible task). You can't really fault Zinn for that; I suppose that's what Derrick Jensen is for. ( )