The Last Knife

When Rick’s older brother chose to go to jail rather than be drafted, Rick confronted him angrily: Why did Howard do it? Didn’t he care that he hurt his parents and Rick? Didn’t he know people would say he was a coward? And now he even seemed proud of it! But when Howard left the house, Rick tried desperately to understand why his brother had done such a terrible thing.
  Rick found some of his brother’s anti-war friends, and when they heard Rick’s story, each one answered him, not with arguments or polemics, but with a true story of conscientious objection out of America’s past. Each tale—from the first one, about a young Indian’s defiance of the harsh code of his forefathers, to the dreadful report of the Ludlow, Colorado, mine massacre when government troops shot striking miners and their families—provides a convincing argument that honorable dissent is among the noblest traditions of a free people.
  Annabel and Edgar Johnson, the authors of the highly acclaimed Count Me Gone, The Grizzly and many other books, have written a remarkable account of vital moral dilemmas that are especially pertinent today, and of how our forefathers faced them and dealt with them courageously.