PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
Contact the NYC War Resisters League
Phone: 718-768-7306
Email: nycwrl [at] worldnet.att.net
War, Nonviolence and History
“Dave Dellinger Lecture on Nonviolence”
Nicholson Baker, author of the recent controversial book Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, will be the keynote speaker at the War Resisters League’s “Dave Dellinger Lecture on Nonviolence” on Thursday, June 11th at 7pm at Judson Memorial Church (55 Washington Square South at Thompson Street, New York, NY).
The event is free and open to the public (donations are welcome).
Human Smoke, which was just released in paperback, was called “a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism [and]… an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified” by The New York Times.
Baker, who lives in Maine, is the author of seven novels, including Double Fold which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001.
The event, honoring the memory of revolutionary pacifist and activist Dave Dellinger who died in 2004, will also include a presentation by George Houser, pacifist and author, and a musical interlude.
The book is dedicated to "the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British pacifists... They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right."
War Resisters League’s Dave Dellinger Lecture on Nonviolence honors Dave Dellinger, a World War II resister, civil rights activist, anti-Vietnam War leader, member of the Chicago Eight, and peace and justice activist until his death at 89. He wrote From Yale to Jail:The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter and many other books.
The War Resisters League is an 86-year-old secular pacifist organization, headquartered in New York City, and is affiliated with the War Resisters’ International, which is based in London. WRL believes war to be a crime against humanity, and advocates Gandhian nonviolence as the method for creating a democratic society free of war, racism, sexism, and human exploitation.
