"[A] brilliant new book . . . Moyn casts new light on much of the surrounding historical landscape . . . Humane provides a powerful intellectual history of the American way of war. It is a bold departure from decades of historiography dominated by interventionist bromides . . . [Moyn's] most original and incisive contribution to historical understanding is taking seriously the possibility of peace." --Jackson Lears, The New York Review of Books
"[Moyn] takes the reader on an excruciating journey, in incisive, meticulous and elegant prose, about the modern history of making war more legal, and in effect sanitizing it so that it can continue forever . . . [He] puts the whole issue in a tough, pragmatic perspective . . . The yearning to avoid war and yet make it more humane will . . . continue, rendering Moyn's book timeless." --Robert D. Kaplan, The New York Times Book Review
"Smart and provocative . . . Arriving 20 years after 9/11, as the United States has withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan, Humane encourages readers to ask central questions too often lost amid the chatter of the foreign policy establishment." --Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
"Compelling and authoritative . . . Sweeping . . . The narrative is gripping and panoramic." --Rayan Fakhoury, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Moyn offers a sorely needed history of how war has become palatable . . . The brilliance of Moyn's [book] is in how [it] wrest[s] control of the dominant narratives that have gripped the public imagination in the post-9/11 years, and in particular, the country after Trump." --Rozina Ali, American Prospect
"Moyn makes a deceptively simple and yet startlingly original argument . . . The contribution is ground-breaking and will likely become a seminal text-because of its content but also because it captures a generational moment." --Aur?lie Basha i Novosejt, International Affairs
"An important book . . . [Humane] points out that Americans have made a moral choice to prioritize humane war, not a peaceful globe." --Dennis C. Jett, The Washington Post
"[Humane] is an important extension of themes [Moyn] has been developing since his critical account of 'human rights' in 2010's The Last Utopia . . . One of Moyn's greatest gifts as a scholar and a writer is his capacity to combine a carefully crafted historical narrative with both an analysis of political and legal discourse and a righteous anger at the abuses this discourse enables." --Jeanne Morefield, Jacobin
"Beyond being a meditation on the meaning of war, it is a history of the tension between pacifism and humanitarianism. In a culture that has come to valorize the latter, Moyn gives the former its due and pushes readers to think about how law can aid the cause of peace . . . Humane succeeds as a bracing reminder not to grow comfortable with war as a status quo." --Stephen Pomper, Foreign Affairs
"[A] learned and provocative book . . . The biggest value of Moyn's book is the ethical questions he raises. Since war today has become so much less bloody, and involves so many fewer Americans, what is to stop it from becoming perpetual?" --Edward Luce, Financial Times
"In this profound and deeply disturbing book, Samuel Moyn shows how efforts to curb war's brutality--to make it more humane--find the United States today caught in a bind where war has become perpetual. As technology further dehumanizes war's conduct, this bind will become increasingly difficult to escape." --Andrew Bacevich, president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
"Humane is a deeply original, powerfully argued, mind-changing book. I predict it will become an activist Bible for Gen Z, in the same way that Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars guided an earlier generation of anti-war thinkers and protesters." --Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America
"This is what books are for: to change our minds. Samuel Moyn has written a surprising, sharp, and deeply compelling reflection on the price of making war humane." --Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
"History at its finest, Samuel Moyn's Humane recasts the iconic narratives of warfare, unearthing the ideas that led to today's forever wars. Sweeping and rich in detail, Humane taps loudly at the conscience of the complacent, sounding a clarion call for peace." --Karen Greenberg, author of Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump
"We tend to think of the rise of humanitarian laws constraining the exercise of force as an unalloyed good. But Samuel Moyn's stunning new book, Humane, fundamentally upends this conventional wisdom. In the process, Moyn also 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
"In gripping prose, one of our boldest intellectuals and most trenchant critics upends the conventional stories that are told about law, progress, and war. Humane exposes the deceptive promise of humanization and its role in supporting the clinically legalized wars of our future. This book is a call 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
"This is a singularly important book by a singularly incisive thinker. How, Samuel Moyn asks, might we imagine a more moral, generous, efficacious, and just plain sensible approach to the end of violence and the alleviation of human suffering?" --Walter Johnson, professor of history at Harvard University and author of The Broken Heart of America: Saint Louis and the Violent History of the United States
