Peace: a Dream Unfolding

Penney Kome and Patrick Crean, eds. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys 1986, 256 pages

By Shirley Farlinger (reviewer) | 1987-02-01 12:00:00

When the weather outside is frightful and your best peace efforts are getting a frosty reception, it's time to curl up with a good book, Peace, a Dream Unfolding.

The first peace book to crack the big bookstores, this is a classy-looking coffee-table art book. Penney Kome handled the text, which occupies over half of the space. She tried to achieve a balance of 50 percent women's content in both art and text. The book has three parts -- The Dream, The Nightmare, and (optimistically), The Awakening. The Dream includes a variety of utopias from Essenes, Buddhists, and Amish to the not-so-utopian League of Nations.

The Nightmare begins with Atomic Blast Effects and the dire predictions of Sr. Rosalie Bertell. The illustrations are chilling. But there are bits of black humor too, as one compares the buttons marked "lunch" and "launch."

The Awakening, the largest section of the book, bursts forth with full-page shots of the big peace march in New York in 1982. It continues with such hopeful actions as peace camps, the Peace Ribbon, civil disobedience, the Peace Tax Fund and peace cranes. Children are included. "Grownups can't be trusted with guns and bombs," writes Cynthia G., age 8. Someone named John Robertson says, "War-talk is manly, front-page stuff. Peace-talk is sissy and suspect. Maybe that's why more than fifty U.S. journalists are assigned to cover the Pentagon, while not one major news organization in North America has made peace and disarmament a regular beat."

Dr. Bernard Lown and Dr. Evgueny Chazov, the 1985 Nobel Peace prize winners wrote the book's introduction. Dr. Lown has taken the book to the presidents of Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela. U.S. President Reagan was offered a copy but declined.

Peace Magazine Feb-Mar 1987

Peace Magazine Feb-Mar 1987, page 39. Some rights reserved.

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