Customer Reviews

Peace: 50 Years of Protest

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is very interesting. Great photos in book....only complaint would be who i actually purchased it from...the binding had been worn and had a red stamp with an R on it...i suppose indicating a return.....so it was not in new quality as they said it would be. The book itself content-wise was great.

Nice coffee table book. Nice photos and (albeit sketchy) text. It's a nostalgia piece (no pun intended)...an illustrated outline of the why of a bulk of the 1960's philosophy. I actually had wished for it to be more, but was satisfied enough with what the book explained/portrayed. Sometimes there just are not enough pictures and words, perhaps?

One of the most iconic logos created during the last half of the 20th century is what we call "the peace symbol," something so generic and so disseminated that most people have no idea where it came from. Created as a key piece of organizational identity by Gerald Holtom in 1958 for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), both that humble logo and that movement have stood the test of time. The history of the early antinuclear movement, spawned during the deep chill of the Cold War, is meticulously and lovingly presented here.

Written by an insider (Miles was chairman of the Youth CND in the early 1960s) this book offers an excellent overview of the nuclear age and its critics, and then proceeds to show how the movement has grown over the years as geopolitical militarism has changed. He also shows how the logo has been adopted by peace groups, ordinary citizens, and the commercial corporate mainstream. Although much of the story is rooted in England (and rightly so), Miles also discusses how CND issues and tactics spread to the United States and other countries concerned with nuclear proliferation and imperialism. It is overall reasonably well researched and illustrated, no lightweight coffee table book. A minor error - Mary Ann Vecchio, the young woman kneeling over a slain student at Kent State after the National Guard shootings on May 4, 1970 was not herself a Kent State student; she was a high school runaway.

It's ironic to note that the Reader's Digest Association published this book, given that they have generally been seen as holding a right wing bias. George Seldes in his 1943 title Facts and Fascism devoted an entire chapter to the Reader's Digest. In the mid 1950s television episodes featuring anti-Communist themes appeared regularly on TV Reader's Digest, an anthology of 65 half-hour family-oriented Reader's Digest stories dramatized on film. And in 1964 Reader's Digest published an article written by a senior editor called "The Country That Saved Itself" extolling the virtues of the brutal Brazilian military coup and dictatorship. The boxed teaser over the headline shouted:
"Seldom has a major nation come closer to the brink of disaster and yet recovered than did Brazil in its recent triumph over Red subversion. The communist drive for domination - marked by propaganda, infiltration, terror - was moving in high gear. Total surrender seemed imminent - and then the people said No!"

May peace prevail.

I was told this item was "brand new" clearly once I received it with the brown marks around each edge it was clear that this was not in brand new condition; it even said it came with a sticker of which it also did not.

Does anyone else find the title an oxymoron?

Peace is defined as a state of harmony among people or groups.

Living in peace is the opposite of acts of protest.

So which is it? Peace? or Protest?

Protesting is sometimes a necessary evil and those who protest can often become heros. However, protesting by it's very nature is designed to make those with a different viewpoint to become uncomfortable and hopefully change their behavior. Protesting is not harmonious. The Boston Tea Party was a protest. It was noble. But it wasn't peaceful.