With echoes of Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson, Sentilles investigates images of violence from the era of slavery to the drone age. The pacifist and the soldier both create art in response to war: Howard builds a violin Miles paints portraits of detainees. In Draw Your Weapons, Sentilles tells the true stories of Howard, a conscientious objector during World War II, and Miles, a former prison guard at Abu Ghraib, and in the process she challenges conventional thinking about how war is waged, witnessed, and resisted. It is a literary collage with an urgent hope at its core: that art might offer tools for remaking the world. Through a dazzling combination of memoir, history, reporting, visual culture, literature, and theology, Sarah Sentilles offers an impassioned defense of life lived by peace and principle. “How to live in the face of so much suffering? What difference can one person make in this beautiful, imperfect, and imperiled world?” But this utterly original meditation on art and war might transform the way you see the world-and that makes all the difference. All the more reason for Draw Your Weapons to be read, thought about and acted upon as best one can.A single book might not change the world. In addition, many world powers seem to be turning their backs as protectors to the dispossessed of the world. As an entity, the United Nations hasn’t been very good at this. Ultimately turning the tide against violence requires people pushing their governments to take concerted action against violence. One value of Sentilles’ book is that it offers examples – from World War I and II to Rwanda, Iraq and Afghanistan more recently – which eloquently make the case for people turning away from violence.

This is a valuable approach but it’s not enough for 'distance learning,' i.e., reading a book. It may be that as a good visual arts teacher, she is permitting readers to fill in outcomes of her unfinished prose with their own experiences. Regrettably, the author is alternately halting and precipitate as she sorts out the material of life that so disturbs her.

Draw your weapons sarah sentilles