• Eyal Press Beautiful Souls Pdf Converter
• Eyal Press Beautiful Souls Summary
• Beautiful Souls Quotes

1. Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times is a sociological examination by Eyal Press of average people who find themselves in difficult situations, and make important moral choices that set them at odds with people and events around them.
2. If looking for the ebook by Eyal Press Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times in pdf form, then you've come to the loyal site.

THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPLOGY AND THE LATIN AMERICA WORKING GROUP PRESENT BEAUTIFUL SOULS a discussion with author Eyal Press 11:30 a.m. Thursday, September 27th 2012 William James Hall 105, Harvard University “Too often we think of courage only as something required to charge into gunfire or scale an icy peak.

Paul Grüninger was a state police officer in St. Gallen, in northeast Switzerland, who voted conservative and sang in the church choir. He was not a worldly man, nor given to fits of moral introspection. But before he saved hundreds of Jewish refugees he met at the border. He stamped their arrival papers with dates just before Aug. 19, 1938, when tighter immigration restrictions had gone into effect. In 1939 he was caught and fired.

Unemployed and broke, Grüninger — one of the four brave men and women whom Eyal Press profiles in “Beautiful Souls,” his inquiry into what sort of person does the right thing when everyone else is doing evil — was refused a permit to open a pawn shop. Dogged by false rumors of sexual corruption, he peddled raincoats, greeting cards, even animal feed. Some Swiss Jews lent him money, but they needed to distance themselves from the disgraced Grüninger. Eventually he and his wife moved in with her parents.

“In later years,” Mr. Press writes, Grüninger “could be spotted on occasion at a local restaurant owned by an acquaintance of his, sipping cider and munching on peanuts, among the cheapest items on the menu.”

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.

Continue reading the main story

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.

Is it the religiously pious? Sometimes. But religious conviction can lead people to cause bloodshed too.

Is there a genetic predisposition to break ranks? Perhaps, but the evidence is inconclusive.

Maybe the refined intellectual, engaged with ideas, manages to think herself above petty concerns like nationalism? That was what Mr. Press suspected he would find in Aleksander Jevtic, the Serb who pulled many Croatians from a line of men destined to be tortured or killed in 1991.

“Aleksander Jevtic had somehow avoided internalizing this us-versus-them thinking,” Mr. Press writes, “which I assumed had something do with his education and intellect, a rare skepticism and levelheadedness that enabled him to see past the blinding passions and compellingly simple ideas that drove the logic of hate.”

He joined 485 Squadron (flying Spitfires) in early 1942 after completing his training. In January 1943 he was posted to the Middle East and joined 243 Squadron in Algeria, becoming a flight commander shortly afterwards. Before joining RNZAF in January 1941 he worked as an electrician. Lane serial number lookup. On 7 April claimed two Ju 87 'Stukas' and three days later a Bf 109.

Newsletter Sign Up

Continue reading the main story

Eyal Press Beautiful Souls Pdf Converter

• Opt out or contact us anytime

But when Mr. Press at last meets Mr. Jevtic, he finds not a Balkan Isaiah Berlin, nor a soldier-philosopher like Orwell. This lifesaver, this ethical prince among men, turns out to be a slovenly couch potato living off rents he collects from a building he owns: “He also liked sleeping late, hanging out with friends, and watching sports” on his “giant flat-screen television.”

Mr. Press surveys the findings of social scientists and neuroscientists, but none of them have entirely figured out where bravery comes from. Every beautiful soul is different.

Mr. Jevtic’s wife is Croatian, which certainly helped him think of the enemy as human. But Mr. Jevtic is also a misanthrope, and his natural social isolation helped him hear the call of an instinctive decency; he didn’t care what his fellow Serbians, including his commanding officers, might think.

He “wasn’t in the business of making good impressions,” Mr. Press writes. “His obliviousness to what others thought wasn’t necessarily his most becoming feature. But it had served him well in 1991.”

Grüninger, the policeman, had a timeless, rather quaint patriotism. His “faithful insider’s nonrebelliousness — the earnest belief in Switzerland’s asylum tradition, in the justness of its laws —” allowed him to see the unjust, aberrant nature of its recent immigration restrictions.

Leyla Wydler, who blew the whistle on the Stanford Group Company, a Houston brokerage running a giant Ponzi scheme, was motivated by her earnest belief in good accounting principles. Her circumstances were not as perilous as Grüninger’s, but that only makes her co-workers’ cowardice all the more chilling.

Even in contemporary America, where the costs of doing the right thing are relatively low, most reeds bend in the prevailing winds. According to research by the sociologist Claude Fischer that Mr. Press cites, Americans are far more likely than Europeans to believe workers “should follow a boss’s orders even if the boss is wrong.”

“Beautiful Souls” offers no prescription for how to become courageous. In the macabre party game of “Would I have the courage to shelter Anne Frank?” there is no way to know. Mr. Press’s book is a hymn to the mystery of disobedience. The brave are not always likable. But when they arise in our midst, we can at least ensure that they don’t sip their cider alone.

BEAUTIFUL SOULS

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

Vaccination program for gamefowl. Apr 05, 2013  7 kind of vaccination program of Aquarius Gamefarm by Mr. Jan 04, 2016  Vaccination Program for gamefowl If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you.

By Eyal Press

196 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.

Eyal Press Beautiful Souls Summary

Paul Grüninger, a Swiss police commander, had a simple explanation for why he broke the law to help Jewish refugees flee Austria in 1938. His daughter remembered that he would repeat the words “I could do nothing else.” It is a humble answer, as if to say that anyone would have done the same.

Except that most Swiss police officers didn’t: they turned the refugees away, as the law required. Grüninger made a choice, and it was certainly not the expected one. He did not fit the image of a resister. He was not a political activist and did not have a history of rebellion. He had a family to protect and provide for. He had taken an oath to uphold the law, and he considered himself faithful to his country. When the authorities discovered that he had falsified the documents of Jews, he became a pariah. So why did he disobey his orders?

That is the question that Eyal Press asks in “Beautiful Souls.” It is not a book of moral philosophy. Press is a journalist, and he is interested in how moral problems play out in particular lives. To that end, he relates the experiences of Grüninger and three others: a Serb who saved the lives of Croats by lying about their ethnic identity; an Israeli soldier from an elite unit who refused to serve in the occupied territories; and a financial industry whistle-blower. Press is not simply storytelling, however. He splices his case studies with brief accounts of other dissenters, along with insights drawn from sociology, political theory, history, neuroscience, psychology, fiction and philosophy.

Press examines his subjects carefully, alert to the different personalities and circumstances of each individual. He weighs the role of prejudice, idealism and community. He explores the “element of reciprocity” in one case and the “anxiety of responsibility” in another, sees the importance of “mutual support” and discusses the frustrations of being ignored. He reads about oxytocin receptors; he studies David Hume. He makes modest conclusions. I don’t mean that as criticism. If Press made more comprehensive claims, I wouldn’t trust him. It’s no more possible to explain an act of conscience than it is to dissect a dream.

We often use the word “conscience” when we don’t know what other word to use. When Grüninger said he “could do nothing else,” he may have been deflecting judgment, or he may not have been able to describe his sense of compulsion any better, his feeling that he didn’t have a choice when he clearly did. “Conscience” is indefinable. It can be indefensible, too: An act of conscience describes an action motivated by loyalty to a conviction, but it usually requires the defiance of other loyalties. It can mean turning away from your family, or your country, or your job, or even your sense of self. Press’s real achievement in this short book is not in his research or analysis, but in his refusal to flinch from that disquieting fact.

Though Press clearly admires his characters, and wants readers to find them inspiring, he can see how their actions can create conflict and their personalities grate. “If I knew only Thoreau,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of his friend Henry, “I should think cooperation of good men impossible.”

Beautiful Souls Quotes

Continue reading the main story

The conflicts can be benign. Thoreau plants his beans, refuses to pay the tax collector, spends a night in jail, writes a masterpiece. But moral convictions can lead to disengagement from civic life, or sometimes even wars. A conscience can be used to justify anything, even heinous crimes. It can lead a person to protect his purity at the cost of harming other people. As Press acknowledges, what you might call fanaticism I might call justice. One Israeli solder refuses to serve in the occupied territories because of injustices perpetrated against Palestinians; another refuses to remove Jewish settlers because they are Jewish. Both men appeal to their consciences. “Measured by depth and sincerity of conviction, perhaps there wasn’t much difference between left- and right-wing refuseniks in the Israeli Army,” Press writes. “Measured by moral content, there clearly was.” To distinguish between them, Press cites “the standard Adam Smith might have proposed”: the “stretch” of their “moral imaginations,” which he describes as the ability to sympathize with those who suffer.

Newsletter Sign Up

Continue reading the main story

• Opt out or contact us anytime

Press shows little patience for the more strenuous claims of religious faith (and devotes too little space to the idea of conscience’s religious roots), and his political allegiances are self-evident. But he does have a sensitive moral imagination, and it makes him wary of too much exalting. Those with whom he disagrees receive his sympathy, and those whom he admires can give him pause. They sometimes disappoint his expectations, and their noble efforts have high costs — often for little reward. Take the case of Grüninger. For doctoring the papers of the Jewish refugees, he was fined and fired from his job. He underwent psychiatric examination to see whether he was “deranged.” His application to open a pawnshop was denied, and so he was reduced to selling raincoats and animal feed. His reputation was ruined as rumors spread that he’d received sexual favors and money in return for his help. Even if he did the right thing, the number of lives he saved was nothing compared with the number of lives lost in the Holocaust. “Was it worth it?” Press asks near the end, considering the fate of someone else who was penalized for speaking out.

If an act of conscience can be a betrayal, it can also be a tragedy. In his first book, “Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America,” Press told the story of his father, a gynecologist who refused to stop providing abortions even after his colleague was murdered and his own life was threatened. Press admired his father’s decision — and yet when he imagined his father murdered, he found himself wishing he would not be so brave. “Who among us would like to see a parent become a martyr?” Press asked. “Or, for that matter, become one themselves?”

In “Beautiful Souls,” Press interviews Armando, the son of Leyla Wydler, a financial industry whistle-blower who was fired after she questioned the dubious financial instruments that her employer was peddling. Press can see that Armando is proud of his mother but also conflicted; he’s well aware of the risks she took — risks that affected his life as well as hers. “ ‘Do I wish my mother would have stayed there and continued to make money?’ Armando asked me suddenly, as though reading my mind. ‘Kind of, you know.’ ” Press does know. He knows that Leyla feels misgivings, too. He knows that those who act bravely are all the more likely to feel anguished, since they know what’s at stake. In some ways this book is a thoughtful gesture of support. That might sound like a small thing, but it’s not. Compassion never is.

BEAUTIFUL SOULS

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

By Eyal Press

196 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.