But thankfully the bibliography is given on the book's Web site in full, so I just checked if the most important paper on the history of early LISP [1] was cited or not. It wasn't, so I'm going to pass on ordering the book's first edition.
One thing about the sample. Is there a chance to get a glimpse of a random chapter you like a lot? Most of it seems to be foreword/acknowledgement and a bit on "what is lisp" which I suspect most who are attracted might already know.
I think you might like this: 'The evolution of Lisp' by Guy L. Steele and Richard P. Gabriel. https://doi.org/10.1145/234286.1057818
The back blurb hints that expert systems might be mentioned, but how much? No one ever seems to go much into their implementation or usage.[0] It also mentions writing some JS, which I guess is part of chapter 5, I wonder if that was a publisher request. (My favorite take on that subject in recent years is https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp)
Would it be fair to say this is mainly a history told through the lens of AI and PL research?
Amusingly I think part of me is already setting myself up for some disappointment -- it seems too short with too few references! But it's good to have a Lisp history book like this looks to be and I'm sure I'll learn things from it, and the promise of more RPG writings inside is enticing. Besides, any complete telling would take multiple books. (There's so much of historical interest locked up in proprietary applications and companies with their own histories, and so many papers published, there's also so much that can be dug through in the standardization mailing list (and other lists, like emacs) archives[1], the SAIL archives[2], the Xerox PARC archives[3], the CMU archives[4], and the many undigitized things sitting in boxes at the computer history museum...[5])
[0] Norvig's PAIP gives a small taste, one of the files: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/mycin-r.l... And a book about a particular system, MYCIN: https://www.shortliffe.net/Buchanan-Shortliffe-1984/MYCIN%20... And a short video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a65uwr_O7mM
[1] http://ml.cddddr.org/ and http://cl-su-ai.lisp.se/
[3] The url I had before is down... I made a local copy but https://archive.org/details/2014.01.ftp.parc.xerox.com might be the same content
[4] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/...
[5] Even in the earliest Lisp reports like https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42766480_Artificial... there are interesting things mentioned like a two-move checkmate program or "Other projects on which work continues include the Advice Taker, visual pattern recognition, and an artificial hand." Multiple times I've tried to track down those sorts of things mentioned in really old papers only to hit dead-ends on so many of them. Sometimes things were embellished, or were abandoned, or were just lost to time, and sometimes there's an undigitized box at the museum that might contain printouts etc. (There might be MYCIN source code, even.)
That can be said about quite a few languages, Forth included. The most powerful != easy to use and/or comprehend.