Colin Sheridan is a writer and columnist. A former officer in the Irish Defence Forces he has extensive deployment experience as a peacekeeper with the United Nations, having lived and worked in the former Yugoslavia, West Africa, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine.
THERE’S a scene in Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon scans the bookshelves of the therapist he is forced by court order to see. “You people baffle me,” he says, aghast at the conformist propaganda displayed before him. “You spend all your money on your fancy books. You surround yourself with them. They’re the wrong fucking books.”
He then goes on to tell the bemused Robin Williams, his shrink: “You want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, that book will knock you on your ass.”
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