Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times - Hardcover

Eyal Press

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374143420 ISBN 13: 9780374143428

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

Synopsis

On the Swiss border with Austria in 1938, a police captain refuses to enforce a law barring Jewish refugees from entering his country. In the Balkans half a century later, a Serb from the war-blasted city of Vukovar defies his superiors in order to save the lives of Croats. At the height of the Second Intifada, a member of Israel’s most elite military unit informs his commander he doesn’t want to serve in the occupied territories.Fifty years after Hannah Arendt examined the dynamics of conformity in her seminal account of the Eichmann trial, Beautiful Souls explores the flipside of the banality of evil, mapping out what impels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention. Through the dramatic stories of unlikely resisters who feel the flicker of conscience when thrust into morally compromising situations, Eyal Press shows that the boldest acts of dissent are often carried out not by radicals seeking to overthrow the system bu

About this title

About the Author

Eyal Press is an author and journalist based in New York. His work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Raritan Review and numerous other publications. A 2011 Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, he is the author of Absolute Convictions, and a past recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374143420
• ISBN 13: 9780374143428
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208