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Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War Audiobook
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Publisher Description
A prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humane.
In the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war. With little debate or discussion, the United States carries out military operations around the globe. It hardly matters who’s president or whether liberals or conservatives operate the levers of power. The United States exercises dominion everywhere.
In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force, from the nineteenth-century struggle to make war less lethal to the eventual shift from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences.
The ramifications of this shift became apparent in the post-9/11 era. By that time, the US military had embraced the agenda of humane war, driven both by the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle shifted from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated, but its foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends only accelerated during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Even as the two administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the “forever” war.
Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless. This provocative audiobook argues that this development might not represent progress at all.
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“Moyn…recovers the now long-forgotten abolitionist tradition, which sought to end war rather than to reform it. This profound historical retelling is an essential and groundbreaking contribution.”
— Aziz Rana, author of The Two Faces of American Freedom
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“The contribution is ground-breaking…It captures a generational moment.”
— International Affairs -
“Moyn offers a sorely needed history of how war has become palatable.”
— American Prospect -
“Encourages readers to ask central questions too often lost amid the chatter of the foreign policy establishment.”
— New York Times -
“Points out that Americans have made a moral choice to prioritize humane war, not a peaceful globe.”
— Washington Post -
“The narrative is gripping and panoramic.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books -
“Takes the reader on an excruciating journey, in incisive, meticulous and elegant prose.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“A powerful intellectual history of the American way of war. It is a bold departure from decades of historiography dominated by interventionist bromides.”
— New York Review of Books -
“[A] profound and deeply disturbing book.”
— Andrew J. Bacevich, New York Times bestselling author -
“This is what books are for: to change our minds.”
— Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire -
“History at its finest…a clarion call for justice.”
— Karen J. Greenberg, author of Subtle Tools -
“This is a singularly important book by a singularly incisive thinker.”
— Walter Johnson, professor of history at Harvard University and author of The Broken Heart of America -
“Humane is a deeply original, powerfully argued, mind-changing book. I predict it will become an activist bible for Gen Z.”
— Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America -
“Upends the conventional stories that are told about law, progress, and war…This book is a cry for moral and political engagement that should be very widely read.”
— Naz Khatoon Modirzadeh, founding director of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict
Awards
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A New York Times Book Review pick of Best Books Now in Paperback
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About Samuel Moyn
Samuel Moyn is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a professor of history at Yale University. He has published several books and writes in venues such as the Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, New Republic, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.
About Stephen Thorne
Stephen Thorne trained at RADA and played several seasons with the Old Vic Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford and London. He has worked extensively in radio, with over two thousand broadcasts for the BBC, including Uncle Mort in the Radio 4 comedy series and the part of Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings. His television work includes EastEnders, Boys from the Bush, Death of an Expert Witness, and David Copperfield.