Donald Dunson is a priest from the diocese of Cleveland and professor of moral theology at Saint Mary Seminary and Graduate School of Theology in Wickliffe, Ohio. He is the author of No Room at the Table: Earth's Most Vulnerable Children. In this hard-hitting ethical tour de force, Dunson presents the suffering, humiliation, and dehumanization of children seized by the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group in northern Uganda, and forced to be soldiers in a bloody and brutal civil war. During the last two decades more than 30,000 children have been kidnapped from their families and thrown into grueling guerilla warfare. The moral diminishment of kids forced to murder civilians, rape women and young girls, and maim innocent bystanders is incalculable. One child soldier who escaped said: "This war has burned a hole in my soul and changed me forever."

Dunson tells the stories of these victimized children and the painful physical and emotional scars they bear. He visits a rehabilitation center where many child soldiers have been given an opportunity to reclaim their lives. There he interviews and gets to know Sunday Obote who recounts his nightmare existence as a child soldier. Despite his suffering, this young man has been nurtured by the love given to him at the rehabilitation center.

Dunson also describes the plight of children orphaned by the war, the dreadful experience of young boys who must deal with a past that will not go away, the hunger that stalks the poor, and much more. Reading this book, we realize how terrible it is when the dignity and innocence of children is denied and they are subjected to the toxins of hatred and unabated violence.