Buy the Book
Beautiful Souls
Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times
“Essential… a hymn to the mystery of disobedience.” –New York Times
On the Swiss border with Austria in 1938, a police captain refuses to enforce a law barring Jewish refugees from entering his country. 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 that 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 flip side 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 but by true believers who cling with unusual fierceness to their convictions. Drawing on groundbreaking research by moral psychologists and neuroscientists, Beautiful Souls culminates with the story of a financial industry whistle-blower who loses her job after refusing to sell a toxic product she rightly suspects is being misleadingly advertised. At a time of economic calamity and political unrest, this deeply reported work of narrative journalism examines the choices and dilemmas we all face when our principles collide with the loyalties we harbor and the duties we are expected to fulfill.
Press
“Essential… 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… a hymn to the mystery of disobedience.”
– Mark Oppenheimer, The New York Times
“A fascinating study in the better angels of our nature.”
-George Packer, The New Yorker
“A wonderful new book… beautiful… exceptional… satisfying.”
—Chris Hayes, MSNBC
“A subtle and thoughtful book… rich in personal, circumstantial details that analytical thinkers in search of clear principles may overlook.”
–The Economist
“Press examines his subjects carefully… In some ways Beautiful Souls is a thoughtful gesture of support. That might sound like a small thing, but it’s not. Compassion never is.”
—Louisa Thomas, The New York Times Book Review
“What drives the unwilling executioners – those rare creatures brave enough to stand up for what is right in the face of real threat – is the question Mr. Press asks in this valentine to the human spirit… [a] humane and absorbing book.”
– Ruth Franklin, The Wall Street Journal
“A stunning, deeply stirring collection of true stories about the most unlikely of heroes.”
-Nomi Prins, Truthdig
“Fascinating… From corporate whistleblowers to Army refuseniks, Beautiful Souls explores what compels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention for the greater good…. This is a remarkable book.”
—“Democracy Now”
“Provides, rich, provocative narratives of moral choice… In exploring [these quiet heroes’] courage, Press makes us wonder if we would have the strength to act against the crowd, and in so doing spread a bit of light in our own dark times.”
– Michael S. Roth, The Washington Post
“‘Beautiful Souls’ gets to the heart of things. It traverses the now often-crossed boundary of reportage done so well that it becomes literature.”
– Michael D. Langan, The Buffalo News
“A beautifully written book… fascinating.”
-John Donvan, National Public Radio
“Remarkable… There are no glib explanations in this book, but there is first-class journalism that makes us feel close to these four people, and that makes us wonder: what would we have done if we were in their situation?”
-Rabbi Jack Riemer, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
“a smart and subtle work that assays the nature of resistance”
– Eric Herschthal, The Daily Beast
“Proving time and again that the boldest renegades are just regular people with independent minds – rather than dyed-in-the-wool radicals – Beautiful Souls underscores dissent’s populist potential.”
-Mother Jones
“A study in the psychology of dissent, but more explicitly it is a collection of stories very well told, a biography of unlikely courage.”
-The New Scientist
“This thought-provoking and moving narrative highlights the different ways people react to moral quandaries and, at its best, makes us question the role our own passivity or acquiescence plays in allowing unconscionable acts to happen on our watch.”
– Starred Review, Publishers Weekly
“[A] fascinating examination of courage… In placing the spotlight on four specific individuals, Press allows readers to place themselves amid controversial circumstances while he challenges the assumption that it takes an extraordinary individual to perform extraordinary deeds.”
– Booklist
“Too often we think of courage only as something required to charge into gunfire or scale an icy peak. Eyal Press looks at courage of a different and far more important kind. His examples spread across decades and continents, and he is wise enough to know that it can take as much bravery to defy an unethical corporation as it does to resist a totalitarian regime. This is an important and inspiring book.”
– Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars and King Leopold’s Ghost
“Beautiful Souls helps us understand why a minority stands on principle when a majority fails. It’s an important book for our time, about conscience, group pressures, ethics, and psyches, and a beautifully crafted one that never falls prey to simple answers about matters of conscience.”
– Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell
Buy the Book
304 pages: $15.00 USA
Amazon: Paperback
Indiebound:Paperback
Absolute Convictions
My Father, a City, and the Conflict That Divided America
A Booklist Editors’ Choice of the Year
On October 23, 1998, Barnett Slepian, an abortion provider in Buffalo, New York, was killed by a sniper’s bullet. Days later, another local doctor, Shalom Press, received a threat that he was “next on the list.” Within hours, the Press family was under police protection, and America’s violent struggle over abortion had come to the blue-collar city of Buffalo. In Absolute Convictions, Press recounts his family’s experience with protesters outside his father’s clinic, patients who braved the gauntlet of demonstrators, and politicians who attempted to appease both sides. With remarkable sensitivity, Eyal Press “plunges into, and transcends, a polarized debate that makes partisans of us all” (The Nation).
Press
“This is recent history at its most powerful and its most moving. Press follows the fortunes of his beloved hometown as it passes through good times and bad, through deindustrialization and blight, and, finally, as it descends into the angry futility of the movement to oppose abortion. The costs and casualties of our cultural civil war are nowhere rendered as starkly.”
–Tom Frank, bestselling author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?
“Eyal Press’ Absolute Convictions is an invaluable contribution to understanding the vast and persistent divide over abortion. Reporting from the ground up, Press incisively and compellingly examines why and how opponents of abortion turned toward violence – and why and how in the face of that violence individuals like his father have stood firm for what they believe.”
–Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here
“The action in his story is gripping, at times violent, and almost always personal, but he tells the story with analytical rigor and moral insight, which make his memoir important history.”
–George Packer, author of The Assassin’s Gate
“Absolute Convictions provides a remarkable new view on a familiar and embattled topic. Eyal Press’ description of the drama that engulfed his family and town is both vivid and compassionate, and it helps explain what it would take to resolve America’s abortion wars.”
–James Fallows, author of Postcards from Tomorrow Square
“Manages the extraordinary feat of bringing light to a political issue that for far too long has generated nothing but blistering heat.”
–Kevin Boyle, The New York Times Book Review
“Riveting… The great strength of this fine book is that it successfully presents twin narratives: a clear-eyed journalistic look at the evolution of a movement, and the story of a son coming into an adult’s understanding of his father.”
–Forward
“Abortion is a tricky topic and Press is brave to take it on… elegantly capturing the emotions, myths, and realities that surround this issue.”
–Abraham Verghese, The Washington Post Book World
“A stunning work of compassion and understanding… The son’s book is like the father’s way of doing his job: calm, compassionate, insistent on seeing all people as three-dimensional, and ultimately steadfast in its defense of women’s right to choose and the right of medical professionals to provide the means for that choice.”
–Laura Clawson, Daily Kos
“What Eyal Press does with his profiles of antiabortion leaders – and his portrayal of their movement as a whole – is something that many other journalists seem to have forgotten is not only possible, but necessary: he is both entirely fair and appropriately damning.”
–Lynn Harris, Salon.com
“If a book about abortion can be wise, beautiful, and satisfying, this is it.” –John Allemang, The Globe and Mail
“A lucid social history.” –The New Yorker
“A gripping and elegantly written combination of memoir, history, and social commentary on one of the most divisive issues in America.”
– The American Prospect
“Deftly integrating personal and social history, Press junior chronicles his father’s path to accidental heroism… An absorbing narrative.”
–The Village Voice
“Press, a journalist with an impressive propensity for investigation, goes beyond simple memoir to search for the tipping point between moral rhetoric and cold-blooded murder.”
–Mother Jones
All Press file:///R:/Downloads/Eyal%20website%20download/Books%20Eyal%20Press_files/sh.htm
- ©2021 Eyal Press. All Rights Reserved.