Dunant's Dream

"The Red Cross was the inspiration - the dream - of Henri Dunant, a thirty-old-year-old Swiss businessman appalled by the butchery and lack of medical care for injured soldiers he came across, almost by chance, during the battle of Solferino in 1859. With Gustave Moynier, another Swiss, Dunant set out to create an international organization which would not only alter the fate of all those wounded in war, but which moved rapidly to establish international humanitarian law, begin refugee work, improve prison conditions and track down those parted by warfare." "Caroline Moorehead is the first writer to be granted unparalleled access to the Red Cross archives in Geneva which have been closed for over a hundred years. Her book traces the origins of the Red Cross, its work during the wars of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its response to natural disasters, including its most contentious and political interventions, and describes the men and women delegates who became the historians and monitors of war. She investigates the long-lasting secrecy and paranoia of the organization and the true history of the relationship between the International Committee and some of the most murderous political regimes of the twentieth century. She also examines the concept of neutrality - central to the Red Cross - and its practicality in the modern world."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.