Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #532202 in Books
• Published on: 1997-04-15
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.01 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 307 pages

From Amazon.com
It is an understatement to call the Nazi and Soviet death camps "outposts of hell on earth," as we know from the testimony of a powerful body of witnesses. Todorov looks inside these camps, and there he finds hope for all humankind, arguing that innumerable instances of heroism, self-sacrifice, and caring show that "moral reactions are spontaneous, omnipresent, and eradicable only with the greatest violence" and that "morality cannot disappear without a radical mutation of the human species." Even in a regime of terror and depersonalization, the ordinary virtues survived and sometimes even flourished, Todorov maintains. His wide-ranging study bears him out, and it makes for fascinating reading.

From Publishers Weekly
The concentration camp-including the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulag-marks a defining attribute of our century, declares Todorov (The Conquest of America), and the extreme experiences there make questions of virtue and vice more stark. In this resonant analysis, the Bulgarian-born, Paris-based critic draws on reports from Primo Levi, Victor Frankl and others, as well as on such philosophers as Sartre and Rousseau. Todorov's meditation is dense but accessible, raising a rich set of questions, even as he occasionally interjects harsh self-scrutiny about his family's life under Communism. He delves into the distinction and link between heroic virtues (courage) and ordinary ones (caring), the "banal roots" of monstrous behavior and the morality of recounting horrors (he finds Gitta Sereny's biography of Albert Speer more worthy than Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah). Though the camp experience seems to confirm that human good never expired, Todorov fears that our technological mentality has made it easier to demonize and depersonalize others. This book was first published in France. BOMC, History Book Club, Reader's Subscription alternate.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Scholar and cultural critic Todorov draws on eyewitness testimonies for his exceptional moral analysis of the Holocaust. Originally published in France in 1991, his book quotes from both victims and perpetrators; Primo Levi heads the list with passages from six of his books. Todorov also examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Bruno Betelheim, Tadeusz Borowski, Charlotte Delbo, Terrence Des Pres, Eugenia Ginzburg, Raul Hilberg, Etty Hillesum, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess, Eugen Kogon, Claude Lanzmann, Walter Laqueur, Robert Jay Lifton, Emmanuel Ringelblum, and Elie Wiesel. His conclusion is that acts of dignity and caring in the concentration camps were not the automatic consequences of animal instinct, but voluntary acts and therefore free, allowing the inmates to survive morally intact under the most immoral and inhuman conditions. George Cohen