Bernadette Brennan, Australian Book Review

' Draw Your Weapons is one of the most erudite, original, and thought-provoking books I have ever read.' “These essays may comprise the most poetic narrative I’ve read this year, which is to say it scorches and sings it permeates the sleeping mind.” 'How to respond to violence that feels as if it can't be stopped?' The first thing we must do, this astonishing book suggests, is not look away.'' 'ainful to read, hard to put down, and impossible to forget. Readers will carry that weight and be better for it.' but it is heavy because it is challenging and brilliant and fierce. 'Sentilles’s writing is pressurized and poetic, possessing the sheen of glass made from airstruck sand.' Geordie Williamson, Australian Book Review Not a call to arms so much as a call to the writers’ pen.' Sentilles’ book inspires us to be more than we are, to live beyond our historical moment. 'A formally elegant and intellectually rigorous argument for peace.

In doing so, Sentilles wrestles with some of our most profound questions: What does it take to inspire compassion? What impact can one person have? How should we respond to violence when it feels like it can’t be stopped? The pacifist and the soldier both create art in response to war – Howard builds a violin Miles paints portraits of detainees. With echoes of Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson, she investigates images of violence from slavery to the drone age. In Draw Your Weapons, Sentilles tells the true stories of Howard, a conscientious objector from World War II, and Miles, a former prison guard at Abu Ghraib and, in the process, she challenges conventional thinking about how war is waged, witnessed, and resisted. It is a literary collage with an urgent hope at its core: that art might offer tools for remaking the world. Through a dazzling combination of memoir, history, reporting, visual culture, literature, and theology, Sarah Sentilles offers an impassioned defense of life lived by peace and principle. “How to live in the face of so much suffering? What difference can one person make in this beautiful, imperfect, and imperiled world?”ĭraw Your Weapons is a reading experience like no other.

Draw your weapons sarah sentilles