All Of One Peace; Essays On Nonviolence

New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Third Paperback Printing, 1997 [stated]. Trade paperback. Very good. xiv, [2], 233, [3] pages. Index. Inscribed by the author on the half-title page. Inscription reads 3/8/98 To Julia and Katherine--You have a wonderful Mom, a peacemaker! In friendship, Colman McCarthy. Includes an section entitled "Baseball Therapy" (pages 185-210). Within this section are essays are such essays as "My Son in Yankee Stadium!, To the Pros [The Orioles signed one of his sons!], Eddie Stanky, Old Friend, and Calling the Corners. Colman McCarthy (born March 24, 1938, in Glen Head, New York) is an American journalist, teacher, lecturer, pacifist, progressive, and long-time peace activist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C. From 1969 to 1997, he wrote columns for The Washington Post. His topics ranged from politics, religion, health, and sports to education, poverty, and peacemaking. Washingtonian magazine called him "the liberal conscience of The Washington Post." Smithsonian magazine said he is "a man of profound spiritual awareness." He has written for The New Yorker, The Nation, The Progressive, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Reader's Digest. Since 1999, he has written biweekly columns for National Catholic Reporter. A writer for the Washington Post for twenty-five years, Colman McCarthy is well respected as a pacifist, teacher, journalist, and advocate of nonviolence. In his twice-weekly columns which are nationally syndicated, he has extolled nonviolence as both a philosophy and a practical way of life. As a high-school, college, and law school teacher, he has taught the principles and history of nonviolence to more than three thousand students in the past decade. What McCarthy has written over the years is, as he puts it, all of one peace. His consistency of vision derives from the indwelling of nonviolence. He blames no one for the culture of violence in which we live, but for a quarter-century he has spoken out honestly and passionately against that culture. All of One Peace is a major part of the body of work that has come to stand for integrity, reason, and candor in a time marked by lies, violence, and absurdity. Derived from a Kirkus review: A collection of essays by a syndicated Washington Post columnist whose nonviolent ethos regularly breaks ranks with the establishment liberal crowd. In 1982 McCarthy founded the Center for Teaching Peace, an organization that supports courses on nonviolence, and some of his best columns here recall those classrooms: How college students know `more about the Bataan death march than Gandhi's salt march' and how peace education might counteract our society's violent impulses. He critiques the pre-Gulf War flights of rhetoric as `a textbook example of how not to manage conflict' and tartly suggests that CNN should more accurately label its programming `Slaughter in the Gulf.' If his opposition to the death penalty is predictable, he ups the ante, challenging vengeance-seekers to draw and quarter murderers. He tries to balance the rights of women seeking abortion with the rights of unborn children—which he views as living beings; he supports both those offering alternatives to abortion as well as to overburdened new mothers. McCarthy criticizes Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall for supporting abortion rights and also offers several forceful columns on animal rights, including a spirited account of a vegetarian Thanksgiving. Columns on so-called `troublesome women,' such as Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin and singer/activist Joan Baez, as well as his defenses of bicycle riding are also good. He's an admirable and unusual voice in American journalism.