"My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading."
— Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts (1904).

Does peace make for poor reading? My short and too self-congratulatory answer would be that Hardy never read Peacework, particularly not one of our summer reading issues. But to examine the top movies at the box office, the list of top-ten selling video games, or even lists of best-selling books, one might conclude that only violence makes for entertaining yarns. Indeed the standard formula for corporate news producers seeking ratings ("If it bleeds, it leads"), would seem to indicate that Hardy was on to something. Is peace boring?

I believe Hardy assumed that peace means the absence of conflict. This assumption has grave consequences, not merely for best-seller lists, but for our ability to gain a hearing for proposed nonviolent solutions. If peace meant avoiding conflict, not only would it be a bore, but advocating peace would mean advocating passivity and acceptance of the oppressive status quo. Instead, if we define peace as the nonviolent struggle for justice, then the potential for fine dramas of peace, and for transformative social change, begins to shine through.

Perhaps one step towards making peace entertaining is to satirize warmongering, and the winning cartoon in the Peacework counter-military-recruitment contest is a charmingly scathing portrait indicting the militarization of children.

Zia Mian continues an analysis of war in a more sober vein in a roundup of recent volumes attempting to make sense of the post-cold-war/present-perpetual-war era. One would think Doug Healy's piece on plans the US military proposed during the Kennedy Administration to bomb the US in order to gin up another war against Cuba was Strangeloveian satire if it wasn't based entirely on declassified documents.

The novel Bel Canto, which became a sleeper best-seller last year, straddles the divide between war and peace, yet the real drama of the novel is not the violent action, but the dramas involved within and between the very human characters caught in an extended hostage standoff.

Nonviolence and the Liberal Arts is designed to help college teachers infuse the perspectives of peace and transformative conflict into fields of study throughout the academy. Adam Hochschild, author most recently of Bury the Chains, is quickly becoming an indispensably vivid storyteller chronicling our violent pasts; yet the focus of his work is often on the survival and mobilization of the human conscience.

Mobilizations of conscience hardly become more dramatic than in the books narrating the overthrow of US-style apartheid, or the nonviolent overthrow of dictators. A new video game, A Force More Powerful, enables players to practice dismantling dictatorships, thus inventing the genre of the first-person-anti-shooter. The Hartbeat Ensemble is also engaged in making peace-seeking dramatic: this collective develops and performs plays about struggles to resist injustice. Gar Alperovitz and Vandana Shiva are the antithesis of boring utopians: both create stirring visions of alternative futures filled with local and global conflict between democracy-practicing equals.

This book review issue maintains the Peacework tradition of listing some of the most exciting new films, anti-racist books, and children's books of the past year, and the tradition of sprinkling intriguing images of reading throughout.

Despite our focus on reviews and reading, we didn't want to wait to publish a small section of articles about the struggles of Iranians, North Americans, and global peace advocates to promote peace and human rights both within our countries and between the governments of Iran and the US. Ten times a year Peacework brings you stories that I believe belie Hardy's claim. Peace, boring? Hardly.