Caroline Moorehead is a biographer, book reviewer, writer and broadcaster on human rights. She worked at The Times, specialising in profiles and interviews, before joining the Independent in 1989 to write a weekly column on human rights -- which was subsequently turned into a television series for the BBC, which she continues to write and co-produce. She is associate producer of a TV series on the Red Cross which will be presented by John Simpson and will accompany this book. She lives in London.
'A balanced, moving and utterly absorbing account of how high the human spirit can soar and the depths to which it can sink' AMANDA FOREMAN, Independent;'A humane and remarkable book.' MICHAEL BURLEIGH, Independent on Sunday;'This engrossing history frequently reads like a superb historical novel... delightful and unexpected.' BRIAN PHILLIPS, Literary Review
'A balanced, moving and utterly absorbing account of how high the human spirit can soar and the depths to which it can sink' AMANDA FOREMAN, Independent;'A humane and remarkable book.' MICHAEL BURLEIGH, Independent on Sunday;'This engrossing history frequently reads like a superb historical novel... delightful and unexpected.' BRIAN PHILLIPS, Literary Review
Moorehead's magisterial study of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is filled with new insights into the organization's tumultuous and complex history. Founded in Geneva in 1859 by a young Swiss idealist, Henri Dunant, the ICRC survives as a bastion of moral authority in a world beleaguered by problems never conceived of by its founders. The book unfolds a moral drama of the first rank, encompassing world military and civil conflicts across a century and a half. In the 1940s, the ICRC's cautious Swiss commissioners failed to protest publicly against the Nazi extermination of the Jews, a serious misstep that has troubled the organization ever since. The last half-century brought Biafra, Cambodia, Pinochet's Chile, a 20-year Iran-Iraq war, and the genocides of Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Whatever difficulty the ICRC has had in adjusting to today's landscape of perpetual strife, no one denies its importance among humanitarian organizations. Moorehead, a London Independent columnist who also produced the companion BBC series, has written an outstanding book, the first with full access to the ICRC's archives through 1945. Highly recommended for every library.ÄDavid Keymer, California State Univ., Turlock
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