March 29, 2011 - 8:16pm
Books of the Week: “The Catcher in the Rye” and “A People’s History of the United States”
BY ANDREW LAPIN
The literary world lost two fascinatingly polarizing figures last week: reclusive prophet of teendom J.D. Salinger and far-left political analyst Howard Zinn. So honor their memories the old-fashioned way: by reading (or re-reading) their most iconic works. Salinger’s seminal 1951 novel, at the very least, should be intimately familiar to you from your high school English classes. The timeless tale of private-school dropout Holden Caulfield’s crusade against the phonies that pervade his world captured post-adolescent angst in a way no author had ever prior attempted, and it still resonates just as well almost 60 years later, despite a new groundswell of ironic hatred towards the book led by “King Dork” author Frank Portman. Yeah, you’ve already read it. Read it again.
“A People’s History” is an entirely different ballgame; chances are, you either revere it like the Bible or wish you could burn every copy. That’s because the book is a no-holds-barred polemic against the evils of American imperialism that Zinn spent his whole life crusading against (within the comforts of the American academic system, mind you). But like him or hate him, Zinn, whose followers include Ben Affleck and Bruce Springsteen, lived an uncompromising and ceaselessly sincere life. And that in itself is something worth celebrating.
