Troublemaker

In this spellbinding memoir, Bill Zimmerman relates his many adventures in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the sixties and offers invaulable lessons on the art of effective protest for today's activists. In Troublemaker, Zimmerman vividly describes registering black voters in Mississippi, marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., organizing for the March on the Pentagon, protesting at the Chicago Democratic Convention, and flying food to protesting Indians at Wounded Knee. He relates how he abandoned his career as a scientist to prevent military misuse of his research, then smuggled medicines to North Vietnam, established an international charity that rebuilt a Vietnamese hospital bombed by Nixon, and helped lead the grassroots lobbying campaign that finally ended the war. Breaking down the complex strategies and tactics of the antiwar movement, Zimmerman provides an indispensible look at the sixties and its continuing relevance today.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.