By Stephen M. Kohn
Praeger, 1987, ISBN: 0-275-92776-8, 170 pages
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While they are a minority in all US wars, draft resisters have helped alter American foreign and military policy, develop pacifist and humanistic ideals, and shape the modem peace movement. From colonial times to the present, thousands of ordinary Americans have suffered imprisonment, torture and even death rather than participate in war. Concise, clearly written, and painstakingly researched, the book tells their fascinating stories. But more importantly, Kohn analyzes the evolution and significance of their resistance in the social and historical context of their times and offers insights and lessons for our own time.

"While its copious notes and statistical apparatus attest to real scholarship in its composition, this sympathetic history of resistance to military conscription in the U.S. is no dry-as-dust academic tone. It is a concise, humane chronicle of the most familiar expression of a very old American ideal-pacifism. Kohn begins with the Quakers, who were absolutists in their opposition to war, and the nineteenth-century abolitionists, who advocated active obstruction of war efforts. His coverage of the modern era encompasses World War I, when Quaker and abolitionist tactics were wedded in opposition to the draft; World War II, when the draft resistance declined; and the postwar years, when it sprung to record levels, especially after the U.S. plunged into Vietnam. Regarding draft resistance as an impulse of civil disobedience of the same order as the colonists' revolutionary resistance to British authority, Kohn concludes with an appreciation of the movement's continued relevance in the age of nuclear holocaust."

Brian David Mussington, Booklist