Book Review: Beautiful Souls

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This is big. Mother Jones just merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting, and this is the first time we’re asking for the donations we rely on. So we lay it all out for you in “Less Dreading, More Doing,” and we need to raise the First $500,000 in online donations by June 22. It won’t be easy. Please help if you can.

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

By Eyal Press

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

What compels people to resist, even when confronted with the risks of bucking authority? Eyal Press examines the cases of four dissenters—an Israeli soldier who refused to serve in occupied territories, a Swiss deputy who aided World War II Jews, a bigotry-defying Serb who saved Croats, and a corporate whistleblower who outed the second-largest Ponzi scheme in US history—and invokes the work of psychologists and neuroscientists to help us ponder the ways we respond to ethical challenges. 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. Acts of conscience, as Press puts it, “have a way of reverberating.”