Troublemaker

February 28, 2011
Vietnam-era peace activism is as adventurous as going to war in this exhilarating memoir. Zimmerman recounts the radicalization via beatnikism, the civil rights movement, and antiwar protests that led him in 1969 to renounce a promising psychology professorship (he feared his research might somehow be bent to evil purposes by the military-industrial complex) and become a full-time antiwar activist. The switch put him in harness with Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, and Jane Fonda and gave free rein to his "weakness for audacious ideas": he smuggled penicillin to the North Vietnamese, filmed bomb damage in Hanoi, and, in a hair-raising set piece, air-dropped food to American Indian Movement insurrectionists at the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee. Zimmerman's narrative is more focused on politics than is the typical counterculture memoir. It's also more about acting than thinking. Zimmerman has a knack for staging demonstrations and propaganda coups, which he transfers from the politics of confrontation to the politics of manipulation when he becomes a campaign consultant, but his antiestablishment ideology remains confused, emotional, and never very reflective—even in retrospect—about the Indochina conflict. Still, his is a vivid evocation of the romanticism and extraordinary shifts in consciousness that the 1960s unleashed. Photos.

March 15, 2011

A political activist looks back on an eventful life.

Zimmerman (Is Marijuana the Right Medicine for You?, 1999, etc.), a working-class kid from Chicago who lost relatives in the Holocaust, struggled from an early age with revulsion over the idea that he might become the American equivalent of "the Good German," a citizen who passively condones the evil actions of his government. His rebellious nature was nurtured in 1960 during a year-long hiatus from studies at the University of Chicago by the sight of French students skirmishing with police on the streets of Paris in protest against the war in Algeria, something unheard of in Eisenhower America. Back in America, he joined a friend working for the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee in Mississippi one summer, during which he witnessed firsthand the sickening effects of Jim Crow racism. Politically ahead of the curve with his peers, he led student negotiations with the university during an occupation of Chicago's administration building as a graduate student, then as an assistant professor of psychology at Brooklyn College. Soon, he was making a career fighting to end the Vietnam War, whether it involved confronting police or his fellow scientists and academics, shaming them for sharing research that could be used against civilians in the war. Zimmerman reveals here one extraordinary example of his activism: At a critical moment, he traveled to Europe to give North Vietnamese officials some stolen vials of newly developed penicillin that required no refrigeration, an act which, if he had been caught, might have earned him the charge of espionage or treason. The author's experiences during the war (e.g., recording on film the damage American bombs did to cities and hospitals in North Vietnam) and after (flying a dangerously damaged cargo plane to drop food and medicine for besieged Indians at Wounded Knee) demonstrate that effective political activism requires no less physical courage than that of soldiers and federal agents. Perhaps overpacked with detail at times, Zimmerman's memoir is, nevertheless, both a thoughtful eyewitness history of America's war at home and a thrilling political adventure story.

An engaging exhortation to take risks and live a meaningful life.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2011
On hiatus from college, Zimmerman was in Paris in 1960 to witness the student demonstrations against the war in Algeria. It was Zimmermans first exposure to guerrilla, the notion of losing street battles to win the larger war of changing public opinion about government policy. He went on to help register black voters in the South, mobilize scientists in protest against the Vietnam War, demonstrate against the war and disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and found an international charity to deliver humanitarian assistance in Indochina. For 15 years, he worked for leftist causes with Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, C'sar Chvez, and others. He worked on the campaign that elected Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago, and Barack Obama, the first black president of the U.S. Zimmerman recalls the passionate ideals of the progressive Left and the risks to life and careers many took to advance their ideals. Zimmerman goes beyond personal memoir to analyze the legacy of progressive activism and its continued prospects in the face of activist conservatism.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)