Draw Your Weapons

By: Sarah Sentilles

Narrated by: Sarah Sentilles

Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

A single book might not change the world. But this utterly original meditation on art and war might transform the way you see the 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.

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. 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?

Draw Your Weapons stirs and confronts, disturbs and illuminates.

©2017 Sarah Sentilles (P)2017 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"With a stunning weave of ideas and images, Sarah Sentilles shows us the world we've broken, and she shows us how soldiers, prisoners, artists, thinkers - all of us - are, piece by piece, repairing it. Fearless, stirring, rhythmic, this book pulses with energy and is full of insights, dark yet ultimately hopeful." (Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City)

"Now more than ever, the world needs a book like Draw Your Weapons. With mastery, urgency, and great courage, Sarah Sentilles investigates the histories of art, violence, war, and human survival. In her haunting and absorbing narrative, the act of storytelling itself becomes a matter of life and death." (Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being)

" Draw Your Weapons is as much about peace as it is about war; it is as much about life as it is about death. Sarah Sentilles, with her passionate, clear-eyed prose and her brilliant, generous mind, confronts us with the realities of standing idly by in a world that urgently needs voices of peace and reconciliation. She puts real faces on the stories we hear all the time in the news and forget about. The stories in this book - about violence and love and endurance and vulnerability - are unforgettable, and they are very much the stories of our time. You will be riveted, educated, implicated, and changed by this book." (Emily Rapp, author of The Still Point of the Turning World)

Indescribable

If you read history, look around the world, and wonder why we bother living at all in the face of so much misery, this book - though often grim in the extreme - will be a balm to your heart. To quote a famous review of William Styron's Darkness Visible, "it offers the comfort of shared experience." Sentilles' prose is piercingly radiant, like a sunbeam through a cathedral window, and its effect is only enhanced by hearing she herself read it. I do not think any voice actor, however talented, could imbue so much meaning.

Profound

Unique and moving. Like poetry that requires no decoding ring. In these times when I find myself numb, this opened me up and made me feel more alive.