Henry Dunant, The Man of the Red Cross

This new, highly readable English translation broadens the audience for Corinne Chaponnière’s 2010 French-language biography of Henry Dunant, the visionary behind the Geneva Conventions and the Red Cross. The book tells the improbable story of how an ordinary Swiss citizen, without official backing from any government, brought the leaders of fractious mid-nineteenth-century European states to the table to agree upon rules and methods for limiting the human impact of war. It then details Dunant’s precipitous decline into poverty and disrepute and his long efforts to rehabilitate himself, culminating with his sharing of the inaugural Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.