Draw Your Weapons [Hardcover]

A single book might not change the world. But this utterly original meditation on art and war might transform the way youseethe world—and that makes all the difference.

“How to live in the face of so much suffering? What difference can one person make in this beautiful, imperfect, and imperiled 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. It is a literary collage with an urgent hope at its core: that art might offer tools for remaking the world.

InDraw 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. The pacifist and the soldier both create art in response to war: Howard builds a violin; Miles paints portraits of detainees. With echoes of Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson, Sentilles investigates images of violence from the era of slavery to the drone age. In doing so, she wrestles with some of our most profound questions: What does it take to inspire compassion? What impact can one person have? How should we respond to violence when it feels like it can’t be stopped?

Praise forDraw Your Weapons

“A collage of death, savagery, torture, and trauma across generations and continents, Sarah Sentilles’sDraw Your Weapons is painful to read, hard to put down, and impossible to forget.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
 
“In her dynamic, impressionistic (and cleverly titled) book, Sentilles focuses on language and images–particularly photography–and considers what role they play in peace and war. Eschewing a traditional narrative, Sentilles focuses on two men&ndlC×