SOURCE: "Small Bodies," in London Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 15, August 5, 1993, p. 16.

[In the following excerpt, Brandmark offers a thematic discussion of Theory of War.]

In Theory of War, Joan Brady reveals a little-known piece of American history that has dominated her own life. In the chaos after the Civil War, white children, the sons and daughters of impoverished widows, of ragged soldiers, were sold into virtual slavery. Black slaves—who had been expensive—had just been liberated. These white children, 'a crop of kids nobody wanted', could be bought cheaply, with few questions asked. Jonathan Carrick is probably not more than four years old, a chatty, active, bright-eyed little boy, when he is sold to Alvah Stokes, a struggling tobacco farmer, a man brutal but shrewd. Alvah beats him into silence, denies him an education and forces him to work from dawn to dusk in the tobacco...