SOURCE: Walzer, Judith B. “After the Movement.” Dissent 32 (spring 1985): 244-46.

In the following review, Walzer applauds Civil Wars's highlighting of disaffected civil rights “warriors” in modern, more complacent times. Walzer believes that Brown effectively chronicles their struggles and praises Brown for her attention to detail.

In Civil Wars, Rosellen Brown has created a remarkable personal view of the long-term effect of the 1960s civil rights movement on two of its participants. Teddy Carll, a native Mississippian, and Jessie Singer, a “red-diaper baby” from New York, meet and marry in the movement. They settle in Mississippi, to live their lives, to work, raise children, and try to “keep the faith.”

This is not a favored or common subject in recent fiction. American politics, difficult in any case for novelists to get a handle on, has seemed especially elusive in its more radical forms. Even the civil rights movement...