IN SEARCH OF PEACE: The Story of Four Americans Who Won the Nobel Peace Prize

by Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 1970

The four (of fourteen listed in the back) are Theodore Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Ralph Bunche and Martin Luther King, and their strange consanguinity--while recognized--engenders some unease and no advantage. T.R. is the stickiest: in the summation, he ""is remembered as a President who was a reformer at home but warlike in his foreign policy. It is often forgotten that once, when it was very important, Roosevelt was also a man of peace."" 'Once,' of course, he helped Russia and Japan come to terms but to say that ""he ended (the war) himself"" is too much, and today the very spectacle of T.R., with his acknowledged (by the author) equation of war with ""fun,"" brandishing the Nobel Peace Prize is discomfiting. The others are unchallengeable as recipients although Martin Luther King, toward the end, no longer had the unquestioning commitment to nonviolence for which his prize was awarded (and by which he is represented here). The entry on Jane Addams unfortunately recounts her childhood wish to live ""in a big house 'right in the middle of horrid little houses like these'"" some pages before it explains what she meant to do there, and that on Ralph Bunche is offside in tracing Israel solely to the Holocaust and ignoring Zionism. Also a partial truth, and particularly ironic today, is the assertion that ""If the United Nations could not make peace, it would be worthless""--which Mrs. Feuerlicht clarifies later but cannot counteract. Nobel, in the introduction is another hard nut: she cannot excuse him but she must somehow redeem him. Only the importance of the subject takes us on at such length: whether one wants to know the men themselves or why they won the prize, there is no lack of sources.

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Messner

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION