Dunant's Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross

The Red Cross was the dream of the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant that grew into the pre-eminent international humanitarian charity. The story begins in 1859, when almost by chance, Dunant witnessed the butchery and lack of care for injured soldiers during the battle of Solferino. Realizing that, although modern warfare meant more, and worse, wounded, medical treatment for the first time could save significant numbers of them, he began a crusade leading to 137 national societies and 250 million members today. Caroline Moorehead, a popular columnist on human rights for the London Independent, is the first writer to be granted wide access to the Red Cross's closed archives in Geneva. Her resulting book engrossingly recounts the Red Cross's full history and the moral dilemmas it has faced from the two World Wars to the post-Cold War conflicts of Somalia, Chechnya, and Bosnia.