We begin this week with The Internationalists and Their Plan to Outlaw War, edited by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro. Peter Yearwood believes this book fails as a work of history, bound up as it is with a deeply flawed and greatly overstated thesis (no. 2257).
Next up is Lindsey Fitzharris’s The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. Agnes Arnold-Forster has issues with a commercial and critical success which ignores much of the recent research on late-19th-century science, medicine, and surgery (no. 2256).
Finally we have Lincoln’s Sense of Humor by Richard Carwardine. Graham Peck highly recommends a reminder of how gifted historians stitch together the remnants of a lost past to deepen our understanding of the human condition (no. 2255).