PEACEFUL HEROES

Atop Addy’s powerful oil-and-collage portraits heightened with passionate swirls of brushwork, Winter pays fervent tribute to 14 nonviolent crusaders. Beginning with the Big Three—Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.—but then going on to the lesser-known likes of Pashtun leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan, El Salvador’s Oscar Romero and Afghani activist Meena Keshwar Kamal, he briefly describes the condition, cause or organization with which each designated hero is most closely associated and highlights some of their acts. He tends to avoid their (often violent) deaths and on occasion delivers debatable generalizations—until Jesus, for example, “everyone thought you were supposed to hate and fight your enemies”—but young readers in need of role models will be hard put to find more courageous, selfless examples than this roster offers. A good complement to Anne Sibley O’Brien and Perry Edmond O’Brien’s After Gandhi: One Hundred Years of Nonviolent Resistance (2009). (Collective biography. 9-12)