Beautiful Souls

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice: An exploration of what impels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention.

“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

History has produced many specimens of the banality of evil, but what about its flip side, what impels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention? Through these dramatic stories of unlikely resisters, Eyal Press' Beautiful Souls shows that the boldest acts of dissent are often carried out not only by radicals seeking to overthrow the system but also by true believers who cling with unusual fierceness to their convictions. Drawing on groundbreaking research by moral psychologists and neuroscientists, 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.

“A fascinating study in the better angels of our nature.” —George Packer, The New Yorker

“Fantastic . . . A brilliant meditation on [the] very difficult decisions of conscience that people have to make . . . I just want to urge everybody, please read this book.” ―The Nation