In Brief
- Narrator: Jeff Zinn reads all seven hours and forty-six minutes of this young readers' edition.
- Subjects: history told from below, dissent as the engine of change, a survey written against the textbook.
- Tone: Direct and argumentative, pitched at a reader old enough to push back.
- Bottom line: A real correction to the standard survey, credited on this page to the wrong person entirely.
Rebecca Stefoff is the only name in the author field of this audiobook. Howard Zinn is the name attached to everything else. The catalog note names him in its own closing sentence: Zinn, in the volumes of this young readers' history, presents a radical new way of understanding America's history. All five written responses on the page are about Howard Zinn, and one of them is headed Howard Zinn, an Eternal Laureate For Truth. Whatever the division of labor between the two was, this record has arranged matters so that one name is searchable and the other is the name readers actually arrived for.
A Closer Look at A Young People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn's argument is stated openly enough in the copy that you can judge it before paying. The book brings to US history the viewpoints of workers, slaves, immigrants, women, Native Americans and others whose stories are rarely included in accounts written for young people. It opens on Christopher Columbus's arrival seen through the eyes of the Arawak Indians, moves through the struggles for workers' rights, women's rights and civil rights across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and closes on protests against continued American imperialism.
Seven hours and forty-six minutes is short for a survey spanning five centuries, and the copy quietly explains why. It refers to the volumes, plural, of the young readers' history. This listing offers one recording, one runtime, one file. Whether that covers both volumes, one of them, or a condensation of the pair is stated nowhere on the page, and for a history book about to be handed to a young reader it is the single most useful fact a buyer could want.
Zinn's method is the reason this book divides people, and one entry here demonstrates the division better than any summary of mine could. It demands that the president of the United States issue an executive order requiring every history book in every public, private and religious school in America to be corrected and rewritten, and that all parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and teachers be reeducated. Whatever you make of that as a position, it is not an assessment of a recording, or of a book.
What Makes A Young People's History of the United States Worth Hearing
Arawak Indians in the first chapter and the president in the review column mark the two ends of what this book does. A single sentence closes the copy and carries its whole thesis: America's true greatness is shaped by our dissident voices, not our military generals. Everything else follows from that sentence. Agree with it and seven hours and forty-six minutes will feel brisk and well organized. Disagree, and no quality of narration will move you, which the catalog note is honest enough to let you work out in advance.
Textbooks are the comparison readers keep reaching for, and they reach for it approvingly. One bought this for their children after sitting through the unabridged version in high school, found it easier to understand and a decent alternative to a textbook, and still wished for more of the stories textbooks leave out. Another writes that the book clarifies several myths in American history with facts. A third recommends it for young people and adults together, framing it as the other side of every story.
Adaptation for younger readers is a genuine craft and the results here appear to hold. The homeschooling parent who wrote the longest entry describes a ten-year-old who resists academics of every description but turns up for the nightly read on demand, and who had moved on to chapter books without pictures by the age of four. That is a specific, checkable claim about the level this book pitches at, and it is worth considerably more to a buyer than any star figure on the page.
Things to Know Before Starting A Young People's History of the United States
Classrooms and homeschools are plainly where this lands, and the star badge is where the record falls apart. A 4.8 heads the record, with a counter of 1 directly under it, while five graded responses appear further down, every last one of them a 5.0. The counter and the response list disagree by four. Whatever that badge is averaging, it is not the grades a reader can actually see, and nothing anywhere on the record reconciles the two figures.
Before you commit, weigh the dates. The earliest response was posted in March 2010, four years ahead of the March 2014 release shown here, and a second arrived in April 2013, also ahead of it. Both are grading a book that existed in print long before this recording did. The remaining three, from 2014, 2018 and 2026, could in principle concern the audio edition, and none indicates that it does.
Teachers considering this for a class should also weigh what the categories promise against what they deliver. This record sits under teen and young adult, tagged for History and Culture, which is accurate and which says nothing whatsoever about the political charge of the material. Fine for a family that already knows what a Zinn book is. A trap for anyone selecting on subject alone, and that closing sentence about military generals is the warning the tags decline to issue.
Who Rebecca Stefoff Is Writing For
Young listeners of roughly ten and up, judging from the homeschooling entry, are the natural audience, along with any adult who wants the argument at survey length instead of at doorstop length. Families building a curriculum around primary sources will find the stated companion relationship to The People Speak useful, since the copy makes that connection explicit. Readers who already know the adult version and want something to give a child have found precisely what they were after. It is also a reasonable route back into the material for an adult who last met it as a required text and remembers only the weight of the thing.
Avoid it if you want a neutral survey, because neutrality is not being offered and the copy admits as much in its final sentence. Avoid it, too, when you need to know whether all of the volumes fit inside seven hours and forty-six minutes, since no one here has answered that and the copy raises the question all by itself. What remains is a clear, quick, deliberately partisan history with sixteen years of readers standing behind it and the wrong name in the author field. Skeptics of the standard textbook will find this the most useful seven hours available.
A Few Questions About A Young People's History of the United States
Whose name is on this audiobook, and where does Howard Zinn appear?
Rebecca Stefoff occupies the author field. Howard Zinn appears only in the last sentence of the description and in all five written responses, one of which is headed with his name. A search for the historian most readers associate with this book will not return this particular listing.
Does the audiobook include both volumes of the young readers' history?
The page never says. Its own copy refers to volumes in the plural, yet one recording of seven hours and forty-six minutes is on offer with no note about coverage or abridgment. Anyone buying it for a course should confirm the contents elsewhere before building lessons around it.
