![]() ![]() Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do-only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans) and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian-Zinn posits-has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). (Author tour)įor Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. While the occasional passage of soul-searching provides some insight into the mind of a tracker, this rant is sadly weighed down by cheerless bravado. The story ends after Pascucci is fired for harassing the ex-boyfriend of his sometime mistress, and however welcome his remorse and ashamed hindsight are, they're too little, too late. ![]() Pascucci tracks other creeps, including Boyce, terrorist types, and a CIA turncoat, and when he isn't speeding somewhere in his Corvette, he's complaining about the modern legal system and pining for the warrantless days of Reagan. The fugitive is duly discovered in Costa Rica and turned over to local authorities, who seem not to care, and Pascucci zooms back to the US without revealing anything about his methodology, though he does discuss his passion for Coke Classic. (Beginning in the early 1980s the underutilized marshals were given the job of tracking down international fugitives.) Pascucci takes readily to the Koizy assignment (his preference, he says, would be to ``track him, whack him, and sack him''). The book begins with a look inside the tracking of Bodhan Koizy, nicknamed ``The Child Killer,'' a Nazi who had spent much of the period after WW II living in New York and Florida, and who quickly disappeared for parts unknown when the government finally took an interest in him. ![]() Coauthor Stauth (The Franchise, 1990, etc.) here uses his ability to let subjects speak in their own voice to devastating effect: Pascucci is crude, unreflective, and egotistical. Josef Mengele's skeleton from its swampy grave. ![]() He tracked down a Nazi in Costa Rica, found The Falcon and the Snowman spy Christopher Boyce, and helped recover Dr. A trash-talking exUS marshal presents his vision of what he calls ``the real world.'' Pascucci, an old-school proponent of law and order and a Reagan devotee, was a US marshal from 1978 to 1989. ![]()
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