Friends and Enemies. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Friends and Enemies

After William moves to town, Jim, a Mennonite, and he become fast friends, yet when Pearl Harbor is bombed and William talks excitedly about serving his nation, their relationship is threatened as William feels angered and betrayed by Jim's pacifist beliefs.

Although LouAnn Gaeddert is not herself a Mennonite, she has married into a Mennonite family. During the Vietnam War she began to ask questions about the validity of pacifism: Is pacifism justifiable in the face of great evil? Can refusing to fight take more courage than fighting? Can one be a selective pacifist, choosing to support one war but not another?

Mrs. Gaeddert, who now lives in upstate New York, was born in western Kansas. She left the state during her infancy, but returned often to visit her grandparents and cousins. The Mennonite archives on the campus of Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, were a particularly valuable source for background material for this book.

Friends and Enemies is Mrs. Gaeddert's twenty-second published book and her fifteenth for young people. Her previous historical novels include Breaking Free, about a boy forced to live with an uncle who owns slaves on a farm in New York in 1800, and Hope, about two children in Hancock Shaker Village in 1851.