And the Worst Book of History Is ... The political direction of the country may be up for grabs until November, but the right has scored an interim victory - if that's the word - in a weeklong contest to determine "the least credible history book in print" just concluded by the History News Network. After a week of voting by readers, David Barton's "The Jefferson Lies" won with some 650 votes, narrowly edging the left-wing historian Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States," which received 641 votes. Trailing far behind were Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard's "Killing Lincoln" (which argues that Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton was complicit in Lincoln's assassination); Thomas DiLorenzo's "The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War"; and Gavin Menzies's "1421: The Year China Discovered America." To many voters the badness of "The Jefferson Lies" - which argues, among other things, that Jefferson in fact saw no need for a wall of separation between church and state - was a truth held to be self-evident. In expert commentary solicited by the network, which is hosted by George Mason University, Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter, the authors of "Getting Jefferson Right," denounced Mr. Barton's "distortions," writing, "As Jefferson did with the Gospels, Barton chooses what he likes about Jefferson and leaves out the rest to create a result more in line with his ideology." But Mr. Zinn's Marxist-inflected account of American history provoked the most impassioned debate in the site's comments section, with some commenters dismissing it as "absolutely atrocious agit-prop" and others praising it as a flawed but necessary corrective to the overly heroic stories that prevail in many classrooms. David Kaiser, a professor of military history at the Naval War College, charged "A People's History" - which has sold more than two million copies since its initial publication in 1980 - with damaging the country, "By convincing several generations of Americans that leadership does not matter and that all beneficial change comes from the bottom," he wrote, "it has played a significant role in the destruction of American liberalism." Others, however, said Mr. Zinn's faults were dwarfed by those of the other finalists. "I don't really enjoy defending Zinn, but the other four are clearly on another level of awful," wrote another commenter. Zinn is tendentious and strident and polemical and oversimplifies everything, the others are obviously all worse.