Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm [VINTAGE 1997]

As new condition blue green boards, navy blue spine and gold spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped color illustrated dust jacket. Includes Author Dedication; Preliminary Page Quotes by Philip Halle; Foreword by John J. Compton; Acknowledgments; Afterword by Doris A. Hallie and Index. "In Tales of Good and Evil Philip Hallie continues his intensely personal exploration of the human choice to do help or harm. In his acclaimed book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, he chronicled the story of the village of Chambon in France, whose inhabitants saved five thousand Jews during World War II under the noses of Nazi SS troops. Tales of Good and Evil focuses on the same theme, on what Hallie calls the "lucid mystery " of those who choose to help others in need, through the life stories of three people. Hallie tries to understand the ambigious decency of Major Julius Schmahling, the German officer in charge of Chambon, who looked the other way as the villagers did their rescue work. He follows his portrait of the major with a riveting account of Joshua James, the Massachusetts man who in the early nineteenth century founded the Life-Saving Rescue Service, later institutionalized by the Coast Guard, in which he and his crew of oarsmen regularly risked life and limb saving the passengers and sailors of ships foundering off the coast in violent storms. The final section of the book is a profile of Hallie's Connecticut neighbor, Katchen Coley, who founded The Connection, an orgainization devoted to rehabilitiating drug and alcohol dependent young men and women. Tales of Good and Evil is also the story of Hallie himself, as he tries to understand his own ambiguous moral actions, first as a child in the Jewish ghetto of Chicago, fighting to protect himself and his younger brother from anti-Semitic bullies, then as a World War II artilleryman, and finally as a philosopher of ethics who realized he could be coldly objective in studying the viciousness of human beings throughout history. In this study in moral ambiguity, written with great eloquence, we see a distinguished ethicist's concern with grasping the essence of good and evil both in daily life and under extraordinary circumstances." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps. "A wonderful collection of narratives, which in their sum offer all of us an opportunity for moral inspiration. Philip Hallie was a person of great wisdom, and these stories tell us what he tried to uphold in his life - the significance of a goodness that is lived out day by day." - Robert Coles. "This is the work of a sensitive and imaginative philosopher who spent much of his life trying to understand how acts of moral heriism and possible. Hallie's account of such acts is both moving and illuminating." - Richard Rorty, professor of philosophy, University of Virginia. "This is a grand, generous, big-hearted book. It is the spirutual odyssey of a man who has fully faced up to the terrible cruelty of the human heart, to the atrocities and the diminishment of the human in our century, but who has then gone on to find out and bring to light the moral heroism that is still there in what Yeats called 'the foul rage and bone shop of the heart' .This book will restore your faith that goodness really exists, and sometimes even wins.Shaw said a miracle is an event that crates faith. This book is a miracle." - Robert D. Richardson, Jr., author. "A powerful, moving text, tough-minded, never sentimental, reminding us of the distinctive voice that was Philip Hallie's and why we return to his work again and again." - Jean Bethke Elshtain, author.…