From Library Journal
Stephen W. Green, Auraria Lib., Denver
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Her research is based largely on four of the more than 150 sources listed in the unannotated bibliography at the end of the book. (Each entry in the book is followed by a list of two to three resources used to research the entry.) For the entries on mainstream individuals who contributed to the peace movement in this century (such as Wayne Morse, A. J. Muste, and Jeanette Rankin), she most often uses Harold Josephson's Biographical Dictionary of Modern Peace Leaders (1985); for more obscure figures, she utilizes the National Cyclopedia of American Biography. For organizations that have been important in the peace movement (such as War Resisters League and the American Friends Service Committee), she depends on Robert Meyer's Peace Organizations: Past and Present (1988); and for her research into the movement's influence during the Vietnam War era, she relies on Who Spoke Up? American Protest against the War in Vietnam 1963^-1975 by Gerald Sullivan (1984). Lunardini covers the full political spectrum in her selection of people and organizations devoted to peace. She includes William Jennings Bryan and Henry Ford's Peace Ship (with a cautionary note about Ford's anti-Semitism) and Socialists Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas. Likewise, both the isolationist America First Committee and the internationalist American League against War and Fascism are covered.
There are a few factual errors. In the entry on the Children's Crusade, which led to the downfall of LBJ, Eugene McCarthy is identified as a senator from Oregon rather than Minnesota. The entry on William Sloane Coffin says he studied with Reinhold Niebuhr's son Richard; H. Richard Niebuhr was Reinhold Niebuhr's brother. Following the main body of the book is a chronology that begins with the founding of the American Peace Society in 1828 and ends in 1983. An index successfully brings together people whose lives crossed paths; it also connects such broad subjects as education and socialism and specific organizations with individuals mentioned in the book's entries.
This ABC-Clio companion provides an overview of the American peace movement for academic and public libraries.
