This book is a concise, interpretive account of the life of Clara Barton from her childhood in Massachusetts through her feats of heroism during the Civil War, her founding of the American Red Cross, which she led for 20 years, and her bitterly contested ejection from office which clouded her last decade. Clara Barton (1821-1912) led a life "in the service of humanity." Undoubtedly heroic and undoubtedly generous in her impulse to aid others, she nonetheless remained a self-centered individual who could brook neither criticism nor ingratitude. Her life story is told here with sympathy and understanding without sacrificing candor or honesty.

This book is a study of the internationalism of William Howard Taft. In the months after war broke out in 1914, Taft was second only to Woodrow Wilson in his awareness of the need to preserve the peace of the world through a new version of international organization. Built upon a synthetic interpretation of Taft's foreign policy ideas and initiatives, the book encompasses the whole of his public career as a statesman, from his years as civil governor of the Philippines through his tenure as chief justice of the Supreme Court. During those years, he moved from a basic belief in the theory and practice of balance of power to the application of dollar diplomacy. In response to the calamity of World War I, Taft came to recognize that world peace must be based upon a combination of idealism and realism, of high-minded principles placed and kept in effect by force, deliberately chosen and carefully applied.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., distinguished American jurist, and Patrick Augustine Sheehan, an Irish clerical-savant, enjoyed a warm and notable friendship based largely on their exchange of letters from 1903, when they first met in Ireland, until 1913, the year of Sheehan's death. This correspondence illuminates what is otherwise a largely hidden and little appreciated side of the mind and faith of Justince Holmes. Sheehan was able to draw from his friend an awareness and s ympathy for human frailty and its counterpoint, faith in a divine plan of earthly things, thoughts and feelings that surfaced in letters to other of his friends. The importance of this edition of the Holmes-Sheehan letters rests in the first instance on this discovery. But Canon Sheehan wsa no mere foil for Holmes as they discussed with equal insight issues as varied as the economic man and the age of faith, of classical works, including Dante's Divine Comedy and Pascal's Pensees. Holmes discovered in the Canon a man of the most profound faith who remained open and tolerant of the beliefs and non-beliefs of others. He is better understood because of his affection for Sheehan, and, no less telling, because of the Canon's admiration for him. Gary J. Aichele in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: Soldier, Scholar, Judge finds this set of letters perhaps the most unusualof any collection of Holmes correspondence published to date.