{"product_id":"waging-a-good-war-440181-1","title":"Waging a Good War","description":"In Waging a Good War, bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks offers a fresh perspective on America's greatest moral revolution--the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s--and its legacy today. While the Movement has become synonymous with Martin Luther King Jr.'s ethos of nonviolence, Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war reporter, draws on his deep knowledge of tactics and strategy to note the surprising affinities between that ethos and the organized pursuit of success at war. The greatest victories for Black Americans of the past century, he stresses, were won not by idealism alone, but by paying attention to recruiting, training, discipline, and organization--the hallmarks of any successful military campaign.An engaging storyteller, Ricks deftly narrates the movement's triumphs and defeats. He follows King and other key figures from Montgomery to Memphis, demonstrating that Gandhian nonviolence was a philosophy of active, not passive,resistance - involving the bold and sustained confrontation of the Movement's   adversaries, both on the ground and in the court of public opinion. While       bringing legends such as Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis into new focus, Ricks  also highlights lesser-known figures who played critical roles in fashioning    nonviolence into an effective tool--the activists James Lawson, James Bevel,    Diane Nash, and Septima Clark foremost among them. He also offers a new         understanding of the Movement's later difficulties as internal disputes and     white backlash intensified. Rich with fresh interpretations of familiar events  and overlooked aspects of America's civil rights struggle, Waging a Good War is an indispensable addition to the literature of racial justice and social vital lessons for our own time.","brand":"Smith College Bookstore","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43248749707353,"sku":"025969839","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0727\/2687\/2153\/files\/9780374605162.jpg?v=1776879974","url":"https:\/\/smith.bkstr.com\/products\/waging-a-good-war-440181-1","provider":"Smith College Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}