Writing Straight with Crooked Lines: A Memoir
Jim Forest
Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2020

I’d like to start with something I hadn’t really realized until I sat down to write this review: Jim Forest and I have lived in the Netherlands for almost the same length of time. In the early 80’s, when I was focusing on potty training, Jim was focusing on keeping nuclear weapons out of the country where I was busy growing up. I’m grateful to him for that.

Now, the book! As with all of Jim’s books, I found the writing style engaging, even if some of the events he recounts chilled me to the bone. I knew the Vietnam War era from history books; what Jim describes is the reality of living in a country where not wanting to kill is a crime. The book succeeds, in a very matter-of-fact way, almost as if it’s in the background, to describe the atmosphere of some very tense years. Had it been described with a great deal more drama and pathos, it would not have made such an impression on me.

Starting at the beginning, his childhood as the son of communist parents, we appear to be taking the journey along with a young Jim Forest as he recounts joining and leaving the Navy, the progress in forming and running the Catholic Peace Fellowship, and his friendships with people like Dorothy Day, Thich Nhat Hanh, Phillip and Daniel Berrigan, and Thomas Merton. [Editor’s note: Mr. Forest’s book has earned the endorsement of such luminaries as Archbishop Rowan Williams and Joan Baez, who refers to him as “my brother in nonviolent arms.”] Wikipedia provides an overview of the main events of Jim’s life, so I’m not going to summarize them here. What is interesting in Jim’s narrative are the people he meets over the course of his long career in the Peace Fellowship, and the first-person account he gives of events that many even now recall during the years of the Vietnam War.