The Anti-Warrior

A Memoir

By Milt Felsen
Introduction by Albert E. Stone

Singular Lives: The Iowa Series in North American Autobiography

271 pp, 22 photos, 1989
$20.00 paper, 0-87745-241-5, 978-0-87745-241-6

"Milt Felsen has written a wonderful book, filled with rare joy and zest for living....it is high time for us to forget the lies and slanders and to salute the leaders of the American Left, the leaders and the millions of loyal Americans who followed them and gave their lives so gallantly and unhesitatingly to the cause of freedom and American democracy. Felsen was with them. Here is his story."—Howard Fast

"Rating Milt Felsen's book for readability on a scale of one to ten, I would give it a ten and a half."—Sheldon Leonard

In 1937 thirty-six nervous young men dressed in ill-fitting blue suits, wearing berets, and carrying identical black valises, were given tickets for an American Export Lines ship. They were told to conduct themselves as ordinary tourists, to be "inconspicuous." They were volunteers for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, traveling the French underground to join in the fight against Franco. Among them was Milt Felsen, a young New Yorker and radical antiwar activist on the University of Iowa campus who had decided that fascism had to be opposed. Some of these young men never made it to their destination. But Milt Felsen did, beginning a march across the Pyrenees which was only the first of his many battles and adventures.

Told with uncommon wit and verve, this memoir of war and resistance is a stirring account of Felsen's involvement in two decades of battle. Surprisingly, this is a spirited and even funny book, infused with Felsen's unbeatable personality. After the Spanish Civil War, Felsen helped form the O.S.S. in World War II. Taken prisoner of war, he escaped in his inimitable style during a 1,200-mile prisoner-of-war march and drove out of Nazi Germany in a Mercedes-Benz. He returned to the United States more convinced than ever of war's insanity and its extreme human cost.

Most of us are only spectators of the world's larger events. Milt Felsen knew the excitement and despair of being a participant. While most war books abound in details of what happened, this one also delves into why. Felsen's straightforward account is refreshingly frank and doesn't pretend to be more than it is—his own lived version of war and common truths.

Memoir