South Sound author gets Beck bump

It's the Glenn Beck version of the Oprah Book Club phenomenon. And the beneficiary is a history professor in Tacoma.

Beck, the conservative media personality and firebrand talk show host, tells his audience he loves a 2004 book co-authored by University of Washington Tacoma professor Mike Allen.

And zoom. “A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror” sails to the top of the Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble best-seller lists this week.

Allen, a 60-year-old founding faculty member at UWT, co-wrote the book with Larry Schweikart, a professor of history at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

It snatched the Amazon top seller spot Tuesday morning and continued to hold it Wednesday. The paperback version sat atop the Barnes & Noble list, too.

“A Patriot’s History” is considered the conservative counterpoint to Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” Allen said Tuesday.

“It’s been out for five years, and it kind of had one splash in 2005 when we reached 38 on the Amazon list,” he added.

The history prof, a Libertarian, said he and Schweikart wrote their book to emphasize that “the American experiment is a successful experiment,” though there have been missteps along the way.

“Zinn’s view is that in surveying American history, really, the cup is half empty, and it’s the story of people who perhaps meant well but perhaps ultimately failed,” Allen said.

“When all is said and done,” he added, “the cup isn’t half empty, it isn’t half full, it’s probably three-quarters full.”

Allen is a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, which Zinn famously opposed. He’s also the author of several books.

A Wall Street Journal review of “A Patriot’s History” said Schweikart and Allen “remind us what a few good individuals can do in just a few short centuries.”

Zinn’s leftist version of U.S. history emphasized the nation’s past from the viewpoint of working Americans and struggling populations. That book, published with a 5,000-copy run in 1980, rose to more than a million sales as an alternative to mainstream texts.

The Jan. 27 death of Zinn, a former Boston University professor, at age 87, pushed both books back into the spotlight.

Now, Beck is helping catapult sales of “A Patriot’s History.”

The book got a bounce after Beck, who got his radio start as a lad in Mount Vernon, interviewed Schweikart a few weeks ago.

Monday, he told his national listening audience, “This book … should be required reading for everybody in the United States. … If you just read and understood the time period between 1880 and 1930, the entire country would change.”

Kris Sherman: 253-597-8659

kris.sherman@thenewstribune.com