cover image Making Peace

Making Peace

Marylouise Oates. Warner Books, $19.45 (327pp) ISBN 978-0-446-51541-2

Inflated egos buoy the characters in this earnest but overwrought debut that chronicles the marshalling of a major peace march in Washington, D.C., in the late '60s. Among the peace movement's inner circle are wry press rep Annie; her firebrand black activist pal Bitsy; radical organizer Kapinski; and Reverend Tyler, a silver-tongued champion of civil rights who owns crumbling tenements and abuses his wife. At the helm is Burnett, a clean-cut charismatic leader who may be an establishment puppet. On the sidelines are Pisano, a likable investigative reporter, and Congressman Mark Mulligan, a prep school friend of Burnett. Oates, a journalist who was deputy national press director for the Vietnam Moratorium, strips the gloss from the summer of love, showing the squabbling, narcissistic side of the peace movement. She frames her story wtih a political double- and triple-cross that is tiresomely predictable when meant, apparently, to be solemnly provocative. Readers may not care whether Annie, two decades later a network news anchor working the Democratic convention, will disclose the dirty secrets of that earlier time. (Oct.)