Peace: 50 Years of Protest: 05/04/08

Peace: 50 Years of Protest by Barry Miles is a coffee table book well worth reading but best taken in small pieces and read at least twice to take everything in. First time through, just look at the photographs that tell the history of the CND symbol, now known more commonly as the peace symbol. Then go back and read the text. Be prepared to be depressed, disgusted and outraged by the different atrocities mankind has inflicted on itself over the years.

The book makes its way more or less chronologically from the bombings of Japan through the creation of the CND symbol to its evolution into the universal symbol of peace through a foreword, an introduction and eight chapters. The chapters cover the man behind the symbols creation and its various meanings, its use in the cold war, the symbol's coming of age, the Aldermaston March, the world wide adoption of the symbol to mean peace, its use in fashion, post apocalyptic stories and how the symbol has been used in modern protests.

If I had one complaint about the book it would be over its presentation of the text. Since the photographs are clearly the selling point of this book, they often times break up the text in disconcerting ways. I had to go back a page or so frequently to retrace my steps before I could be sure I had read a sentence of a paragraph to its conclusion.

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