Tui Motu Interislands Magazine, 30 June 2025. Review by Thomas Hassan Walker
Hidden Stories of Heroism for a Peaceful Planet is about people who have actively tried to find peaceful solutions to problems that they wanted to solve.
Each of the 14 chapters is about a different peacemaker or group of peacemakers and at the end of these chapters there is a summary including a timeline and other books or websites with more information. I found the summary useful, especially for finding specific dates of important events.
The people and circumstances in the chapters vary massively, from the Moriori people of Rēkohu/Chatham Islands to the invasion of Czechoslovakia. I highly recommend this book for people my age (teens) as it’s an easy read and has lots of useful information and detail which can easily be extracted from the text. It might be useful for teachers too.
Being a reasonably short read, at 114 pages, Hidden Stories can be finished quickly and easily if you don’t have enough time to read a big biography of each person – a “pick up and go” sort of a book.
I thought this book was very well written with many interesting people that I had never heard of before – and one person I’d met, which was a surprise!