Everything Button War

This book is being dis­cussed in class­rooms, book clubs, and peace orga­ni­za­tions around the world, so I offer you some inter­est­ing tid­bits about The But­ton War:

Behind the story

It must have been some­thing like forty years ago.

I was vis­it­ing my father-in-law with my old­er boys. They were play­ing with some­thing they were col­lect­ing, per­haps base­ball cards, or some such.

Look­ing on, my father-in-law said, “When I was a kid, we boys col­lect­ed things, too.”

The sto­ry he told was rather unusu­al. He was raised in a vil­lage some­where in East­ern Europe, but with so many nation­al bound­ary changes, he could not even say pre­cise­ly which coun­try. Dur­ing World War One, he said, his vil­lage was invad­ed and tak­en over by now this army, now that, from dif­fer­ent nations. When these armies took over his vil­lage, the sol­diers com­man­deered the women to wash their uni­forms. Once washed, the uni­forms were hung out to dry. The boys in the village—so my father-in-law related—would sneak about, cut the but­tons from the uni­forms, col­lect them, and trade them amongst them­selves. This in the midst of The Great War. read more

Sam­ple Chapter

Can­dlewick offers Chap­ter 1, read­able online and as a down­load­able PDF

Pod­cast and transcript

TeachingBooks.net inter­viewed me about The But­ton War. Tran­script included.

Dis­cus­sion

Kat Day­ton writes, “This is How The But­ton War Helped My Kids Think about Big­ger Issues at the Bor­der,” St. George News, 24 June 2018

Read­ing Group Choic­es interview