Reviews

Endorsements for Giving Up The Gun, coming from Barclay Press, December 2023:

Eileen McCarron, President, Colorado Ceasefire Legislative Action:

“In his book Giving Up the Gun, Edward W. Wood, Jr., reflects on his evolution from wounded soldier to peace activist and describes how guns have contributed to America’s shame in its history of slavery, racial prejudice, savagery towards Native Americans and the working class. He cogently argues both literally and metaphorically to Give up the Gun.”

Tristan Bridges, PhD, Vice Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara; Co-Editor, Men and Masculinities:

“Edward W. Wood, Jr.’s Giving Up the Gun tells the story of Wood Jr.’s journey to peace and toward a life without guns recognizing how his relationship with guns robbed him of experiencing elements of a shared humanity with others. While the memoir is manifestly about guns, it’s written such that the ways guns shape relationships and social life is at the forefront. Wood Jr. deftly analyzes the ways his own history of guns was wrapped in in classist, racist, xenophobic masculine cultures deeply entrenched with guns and gun culture in the U.S. starting, for him, with his own family and his relationship with his father. Giving Up the Gun tells a hopeful story offering a powerful testament of just how much is to be gained from renouncing guns.”

Robert Griswold, author of Pendle Hill pamphlet, Creeds and Quakers, and conscientious objector:

“Soldiers returning to their country are often claimed to be special because they have served in a military cause. This thin veneer of honor serves to hide the hideousness of war and the suffering of those led to fight. Ed Wood’s book, Giving Up the Gun, reveals what has been hidden, the easy exposure of soldiers to harm, the pain of lasting injury, the struggle for a soldier to find a clear understanding for that experience.”

Donald Anderson, author, most recently, of QUAGMIRE: Personal Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan and Fragments of a Mortal Mind: A Nonfiction Novel:

“Edward W. Wood, Jr. is, surely, one of American’s most courageous and most focused of writers. In crystal prose, Giving Up the Gun is formidably intelligent, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest. It is a book for adults and voting citizens—a transcendent appeal to our humanity, yours and mine. A must read.”

Daniel Clayton, Professor Emeritus, Regis University, and the founder of the Center for the Study of War Experience:

“On his single day of combat fighting as a replacement soldier in the battle for eastern France in September 1944, Ed Wood Jr. was severely wounded by fragments of an exploding artillery shell. Ed struggled all his life to understand what happened to him on being wounded that day; writing and speaking about his war experience was a salve for Ed’s great pain. In this final meditation on his life’s work, Ed explores his own family’s history to explain how he came to find meaning in his suffering by giving up his guns, an act of conscience inspired by his mother’s love.”

Evan Weissman, Founder and Executive Director of Warm Cookies of the Revolution, a civic art initiative; playwright and actor:

“Haunted by the fact that generations of men in his family worshipped the gun, while also being profoundly shaped by his mother’s love, Ed Wood wrestles deeply with his conscience and with the intertwining legacies of sexism, racism, militarism, and classism. Giving Up the Gun honestly walks us through the realities of “the beast of war” (Wood’s preferred term for what we now clinically call PTSD) and offers us a way out of our obsession with guns and domination. Are we brave enough to follow his lead?”

Worshipping the Myths of World War II, Potomac Books, November 2007

Howard Zinn, American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist intellectual and World War II veteran:

“This intelligent and eloquent rumination by a wounded veteran of ‘the good war,’ with its impassioned renunciation of all wars, could not be more timely. Whatever the moral core of World War II, which Edward Wood freely acknowledges, that experience has been used to create myths, from Vietnam to Iraq, which perpetuate the idea that war is a proper solution for the world’s problems. Wood not only dissects that mythology in its political and artistic forms, but he points, with persuasive argument, to the possibility of a world without war.”

On Being Wounded, Fulcrum Publishing, September, 1991:

“Taut memoir focusing on Wood’s “lifelong search for a life outside of killing grounds.” Eddie Wood was everything it takes to make a serious soldier—18, good with a gun, with a big, tough hard-drinking hero-daddy and a southern lineage going back a century, during which every generation of men bore arms.

On the way to battle in WW II, however, he watched a Frenchman shave the head of a naked woman collaborator and glimpsed the face of a teenage girl who knew she would soon be raped. Sent into combat, he was badly wounded, skull and butt, in his first firefight.

Here, after detailing these transformative experiences, Wood takes us over the classic American route that got him to the killing grounds, weaving old family letters, his own journals, and the sharp, clear images of his present-tense writing into an uneven but harrowing examination of pain. He doesn’t flinch from the details, including his alienation from a mother who accepted war too well and a father transformed from hero to war profiteer.

In plain and pointed language he gets right to the heart of the matter for him—how guns, violence and a perversely macho sexuality inescapably suffused his experience, creating the killing grounds of peace. Struggling as an unpublished writer, he slowly declined into divorce, inability to hold a job, and ever-increasing alienation—only to be reborn as a father, MIT graduate, and Washington hustler chasing power and sex down the Beltway in the 70s.

All along, Wood keeps his uncompromised eye on the core of violence that he sees as tainting American life in general, and finally emerges as that rare bird, a fighting liberal. Reminiscent of Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July: a fierce, loving, brooding, sometimes awkward book that deals with difficult, unpopular themes head-on.”