I felt, like some of the other commenters, that I was close to buying the book, but that the sample on Amazon wasn't helping to support a buying decision.

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.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/800055.802047