Evil, Goodness, and Creating Active Bystandership: A Memoir

"Staub's message is both powerful and timely." -Publishers Weekly
“A measured blend of memoir and scholarship with urgent contemporary relevance.” —Kirkus Reviews

Evil, Goodness, and Creating Active Bystandership shares the remarkable journey of Ervin Staub, a scholar and actor in the world whose early life was shaped by surviving the Holocaust in Hungary and growing up under communism. After escaping Hungary and immigrating to the US, he received a PhD from Stanford, going on to teach at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Massachusetts.

Pursuing a lifelong commitment to prevent evil and promote goodness, Staub studied the roots of caring, helping, and mass violence and worked to move children and adults to care for others and be "active bystanders" who respond to the need for help. He has promoted reconciliation in Rwanda after a genocide; peace between ethnic and Muslim Dutch in Amsterdam; police officers training to prevent unnecessary violence by fellow officers; and more. Through concrete stories and real-life experiences, Evil, Goodness, and Creating Active Bystandership offers practical ways to create a more peaceful, harmonious, and connected world, even in our turbulent times.

Ervin Staub, PhD, survived the Holocaust as a young child and at eighteen escaped from communist Hungary, then received a PhD at Stanford and taught at Harvard, the University of Massachusetts, and Stanford. He has published six books, including The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence and The Roots of Goodness and Resistance to Evil, and edited/coedited four more. He has also published many articles and book chapters and written blogs for Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and Oxford, appeared on TV and radio, and his work has been widely reviewed in the media.