Latest reviews – outlawing war, Victorian surgery and Lincoln’s jokes

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).