Review by Choice Review
In Waging a Good War, Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist Ricks brings his expertise in American foreign affairs and national security to bear on the Black freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on scholarly accounts, activists' memoirs, and the digitized sources of various organizational archives, the book offers an impressive synthesis of the movement's history, albeit with a twist. Contending that the struggle can best be understood through the extended martial metaphor of warfare, this history is simultaneously conventional and subversive. The frame and scope of the narrative will be familiar--running from Montgomery, AL, to Memphis, TN, Ricks draws a sharp distinction between civil rights and Black Power and focuses exclusively on Black activism in the South--but Waging a Good War pushes the easily celebrated story of ministerial leadership and magisterial marches. By ably probing the interplay of strategic vision, tactical action, planning, and preparation in the movement's challenge to Jim Crow, Ricks expands the cast of activists, highlights interpersonal and organizational rivalries, charts the sometimes uncertain relationship between short-term setbacks and long-term victories, and foregrounds the physical and psychological toll that activism took. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers and lower-division undergraduates. --Joseph E. Hower, Southwestern University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
War-fighting doctrine is an unfamiliar yet ideal way to frame America's "civil rights revolution," according to this penetrating study. Pulitzer winner Ricks (Fiasco) illuminates episodes in the struggle against Southern segregation, including the 1956--1957 Montgomery bus boycott, during which Martin Luther King Jr. crafted his strategy of nonviolent action, and the 1960 Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins, for which activists received careful training, including role-playing sessions in which they were hit, spat on, and doused with coffee. The 1963 Birmingham desegregation campaign--the movement's "Gettysburg," in Ricks's telling--was won by the public-relations masterstroke of a Black children's march that braved public safety commissioner Bull Connor's fire hoses and police dogs, while the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer voter registration drive saw activists weathering violence--six murders, dozens of beatings and bombings--that scarred them, like shell-shocked soldiers, with "battle fatigue." Ricks's military metaphors sometimes feel strained, but they incisively spotlight the nuts and bolts of the movement's achievements: meticulous planning and organizing, shrewd analysis of goals and the means to accomplish them, maintenance of discipline and morale, and cold-blooded realism. The result is a trenchant and stimulating guide to the strategies and tactics that can achieve sweeping social change. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Specializing in military strategy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, No. 1 New York Times best-selling Ricks (Fiasco) examines the Civil Rights movement in its light, arguing that the successes of the past century were won not only by idealists like Martin Luther King Jr. but by the kind of recruiting, training, and organization that characterizes every triumphant military campaign. With a 200,000-copy first printing.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A novel interpretation that conceives of the civil rights movement in terms of a sequence of military campaigns "on carefully chosen ground that eventually led to victory." As Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist Ricks notes, the campaign for civil rights was fought by "a disciplined mass of people [who] waged a concerted, organized struggle in dedication to a cause." While that campaign was nonviolent, those involved understood that, as Gandhi said, "there is no civil disobedience possible, until the crowds behave like disciplined soldiers." As with any military operation, this disciplined behavior hinged on extensive training and precise communication. In this regard, it's no surprise that many early civil rights activists were Black veterans of World War II, returning soldiers who found that they were denied the democratic rights for which they had fought. The Fort Sumter moment of the struggle came during what was conceived as a siege on the Alabama city of Montgomery, with its iconic symbol, Rosa Parks, trained in nonviolent resistance at the Highlander Folk School, "a leftist, pro-labor, racially integrated outpost in the hills of eastern Tennessee." The most challenging part of that resistance was "declining to counterattack the hoodlums sometimes set upon them," a refusal to fight back physically that led to revulsion on the part of an electorate watching Bull Connor's water cannons and police dogs and George Wallace's defiant White supremacy. Quite simply, Ricks ventures, the Southern police were disarmed by nonviolence, which they had no idea how to counter. An encounter between the sheriff of Selma and defiant future politician John Lewis is emblematic, proving that nonviolent resistance is anything but passive--a matter that, Ricks suggests, modern activists should study as one of the "clear and concrete lessons we can take from [the civil rights movement], especially from its focus on discipline and organization." A thoughtful contribution to the history of the struggle for civil rights in America. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
