HENRI DUNANT: MAN IN WHITE

In honor of the Red Cross' centennial, this story of its founder, about whom there-seems to be very little in print, has been told through spasmodic scenes and reconstructed conversations. He is seen as the son of a man with progressive pacifist ideas; as a youth who at an early age became a determined visionary; on his 21st birthday when he secured the release of a prisoner (who robbed him); at thirty, a business man, shattered psychically by the destruction he had witnessed at Solferino which motivated him to proselytize for peace and to originate the Geneva Convention. At fifty he was alone and almost an old man; at sixty odd, a bearded eccentric- or prophet -- glimpsed in a village; and in the final fade-out he is in the poorhouse where he spent 16 years. The biography would be more effective were it not for the discontinuity of the presentation.