"‘Empire’ takes different parts of the book," says Zinn. "It plucks out those parts that deal with American expansion." It opens with 9/11 and then jumps back to explore the cycles of U.S. expansionism from Wounded Knee to Iraq, stopping along the way at World War I, Central America, Vietnam, and the Iranian revolution.
"They also made me the narrator," said Zinn, "and included stuff from my memoir. The character that "purports to be me shows me in various postures of indignation," Zinn adds, with a chuckle. Zinn did persuade them to leave his spectacles off, but as to his likeness, he allows cartoonists have to do what they do. "They didn’t make me look like Tom Hanks," he says. The graphic book also follows Zinn as the son of poor Jewish immigrants, from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as an activist, Boston University professor and radical historian.
It considers "my growing realization that America really is an empire, " said Zinn. "It is an imperial power, which is an idea I didn’t have as a teenager or even when I was studying history, but came to me after reading enough history, and looking at what we were doing after World War II, this pattern of U.S. intervention." Tickets for the reading, which will include Konopacki, are $5 and available at the sponsoring Harvard Book Store.
For updated news on Zinn’s four-hour mini-series "The People Speak," shot mostly in Boston with actors such as Viggo Mortensen, Josh Brolin, Danny Glover and Marisa Tomei, check out my piece up on www.newengland.com.
64 Brattle St., Cambridge, 617-876-6837 www.brattlefilm.org
he United States" was brought to him by historian Paul Buhle and cartoonist Mike Konopacki. It’s called "A People’s History of American Empire" and Zinn celebrates its release with a reading and talk at the Brattle Theatre Thursday April 24 at 6 p.m.