90 receives wonderful 5 star review on Amazon!

90: A Conscientious Objector’s Journey of Quiet Resistance by Bruce Jay Wasser with Fern Schumer Chapman is, fittingly, the quiet memoir of a conscientious objector’s quest to marry his visceral moral objection to the Vietnam War with his equally visceral patriotic duty to serve the county he so loves. Fundamentally, Wasser’s memoir begs the question: What does it mean to be a patriot? Where on the line should one plant oneself between blind deference to the country’s leaders and loyalty to their own moral code?

This stirring and moving memoir follows Wasser’s formative years and his oftentimes icy relationship with his mother and others as he attempts to reconcile what it means to be a patriot in a time where emotions were high on both sides of the fence.

Charmingly, we are introduced to many characters at Princeton who helped mold Wasser into the high school history teacher that he later became. So many winding roads led him to his profession, and it was fun to be enmeshed into his world in New Jersey in the late ‘60s – early ‘70s. His keen ability to take the reader to that time and place is a delight.

An underlying theme in the memoir is about the road left untaken: What IF Wasser had become a civil rights attorney or a public defender as he had planned, and not a public high school history teacher? We’ll never know what influence he would have had had he become an attorney (we can guess it would have been enormous), but teaching public school, well, that sure ain’t nothing, and some would argue that it’s everything.

90 was Wasser’s draft number; the broadcast of lottery numbers pulled live on television he likens to a ‘bizarre bingo game’. He makes clear to the reader that an entire generation of draft-aged men were terrorized by the capriciousness of being assigned random numbers that are pulled from a cage. As a Gen X mother of two Gen Z men, we have been fortunate to have been spared such horror. To us, a number is a number. That generation of men literally saw their futures reflected in their assigned number.

Although written about his experiences as a CO in the Vietnam War, the lessons in Wasser’s memoir are applicable and timely today, when we once again have a self-proclaimed ‘madman’ in the White House. What would you do if you were drafted today? What would you have your children do today if the draft was reinstituted in the interest of US colonization?

This important memoir was written so engagingly that one could easily read it in a day and hardly look up. I have deemed it such an important lesson that I have purchased multiple copies to give to friends and family of several different generations.

Once a history teacher, always a history teacher.

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