There Won't Be War

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Just before this book went to print, I turned to my oldest daughter, Annie, who was sitting beside me in the car, and asked her:

“Would you read a book about peace?”

She hesitated, that cautious look that eleven-year-olds often have in her eye. “I don’t know ...”

I thought I understood and I said: “Because it might not be exciting enough?”

“No ... I’m wondering what it would be about, Daddy.”

“What do you mean?”

“What would the book really be about?”

I lied. “About a peaceful world, I guess—people living in harmony, getting along, respecting one another.”

There was a long pause. “I’d rather,” she said at last, “read about how we got there. How we made a world like that ....”

This from an eleven-year-old. Maybe there’s hope after all.

“Thank you,” I said. “That’s exactly what my good friend Harry and I have put together—a book about the struggle for peace, not peace itself. I do hope you like k.”

I’d been expecting, as Harry knows, the reaction of so many adult readers to peace—or for that matter, to Utopias, those perfect societies we keep making in fiction that somehow never ring quite true: “Why would I want to read about perfect harmony?” we hear. “There’s no conflict, no drama. It’s boring, isn’t it?”

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