Here's an excerpt of a book review that makes me want to go out and get the book:
What makes this book feel essential is not the admirably unobtrusive writing, nor any particular originality. Mr. Press, a journalist for The Nation and other magazines, propounds no new theories, relying on thinkers from Adam Smith to the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that what made the Holocaust possible was the rise of bureaucracy: when everybody is at a desk doing a discreet task, it is easy to disclaim responsibility for the policy carried out. If one follows Mr. Bauman’s thinking, brave people are often those who have resisted being colonized by bureaucracy.
No, what makes you eager to push this book into the hands of the next person you meet are the small, still moments, epics captured in miniature, like the lonely man with his cider and peanuts.
Mr. Press’s case studies — there’s also a Serbian soldier who rescued Croatians about to be sent to detention, an elite Israeli officer who refused to serve in the West Bank, and a financial adviser who blew the whistle on her corrupt Texas firm — capture how the price of moral courage is often not dramatic condemnation, not the martyr’s posthumous exaltation, but a lifelong sentence to sit apart, with no chance for appeal. For example the Israeli soldier, Avner Wishnitzer, helped to spark a national debate about when it is appropriate to defy military orders, but for Mr. Press the more interesting fact is that the soldier’s own mother, even as she defended his choices, was a little embarrassed by him.
Because most of us are not beautiful souls, we are made uncomfortable by those who are (even when they are our children). They stand as living rebukes to our cowardice. Mr. Press wants to discover what kind of person risks that kind of aloneness.
What makes this book feel essential is not the admirably unobtrusive writing, nor any particular originality. Mr. Press, a journalist for The Nation and other magazines, propounds no new theories, relying on thinkers from Adam Smith to the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that what made the Holocaust possible was the rise of bureaucracy: when everybody is at a desk doing a discreet task, it is easy to disclaim responsibility for the policy carried out. If one follows Mr. Bauman’s thinking, brave people are often those who have resisted being colonized by bureaucracy.
No, what makes you eager to push this book into the hands of the next person you meet are the small, still moments, epics captured in miniature, like the lonely man with his cider and peanuts.
Mr. Press’s case studies — there’s also a Serbian soldier who rescued Croatians about to be sent to detention, an elite Israeli officer who refused to serve in the West Bank, and a financial adviser who blew the whistle on her corrupt Texas firm — capture how the price of moral courage is often not dramatic condemnation, not the martyr’s posthumous exaltation, but a lifelong sentence to sit apart, with no chance for appeal. For example the Israeli soldier, Avner Wishnitzer, helped to spark a national debate about when it is appropriate to defy military orders, but for Mr. Press the more interesting fact is that the soldier’s own mother, even as she defended his choices, was a little embarrassed by him.
Because most of us are not beautiful souls, we are made uncomfortable by those who are (even when they are our children). They stand as living rebukes to our cowardice. Mr. Press wants to discover what kind of person risks that kind of aloneness.
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