Perspectives on Eichmann: Explaining Perpetrator Behaviour, by Andrew Elsby
The purpose of this book is to assess the existing explanations of Adolf Eichmann’s perpetrator behaviour. These include Eichmann as a monster of abnormal personality, Arendt’s influential and controversial claim that Eichmann was entirely normal but devoid of capacity for moral reasoning, and Stangneth’s and Cesarani’s characterisation of Eichmann as an eliminationist antisemite. Arguments against these explanations are presented and the book argues that Eichmann was entirely normal not in the cognitive sense of limited moral awareness and poor appreciation of the consequences of his actions but in the sense of optimisation of his own outcomes in material, social and psychological terms regardless of the cost to others. This new argument is supported by reference to the social psychological experiments of Milgram on obedience to immoral authority and Zimbardo on the influence of role on behaviour, by reference to Browning’s research on the perpetrator behaviour of a German police reserve battalion in Poland, and by reference to research on Einsatzgruppen commanders.
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L'altra donna, by Peter Cowlam with Angela D'Ambra
The 1970s. Bruce takes over a financial consultancy firm founded by his father, while student Marisa inherits property. Love, lust and money drive them both, until their relationship ends, with Bruce committed to commerce and Marisa setting off in search of social justice. Twenty-five years after an intense and bad-tempered affair, a chance entry in one of Bruce’s business listings shows that Marisa is now boss of the Rae Agency – a media PR concern. Bruce, as he recollects their partnership, is torn between his staid if harmonious family life, and renewing contact with Marisa. Finally, he does commit to a course of action, but must face the truth of not having grasped the widening cultural and social separation their two different views of the world have wrought over the intervening quarter century. First published in its original English, this edition in Italian translation by the distinguished translator Angela D'Ambra.
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Reassessing the Chesterbelloc, by Jon Elsby
Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton were two of the biggest names on the Georgian literary scene. They were what today would be called 'public intellectuals'. Each wrote nearly a hundred books in a variety of genres and on a huge range of subjects. But they are now almost entirely unread. The author argues that it is time to reassess their achievement. He maintains that, while their work is uneven and some of it is frankly ephemeral, their best work deserves to be rediscovered and read without bias. They will then be seen as writers who offered a robust critique of modernity, and thereby have provided us with resources with which to question and challenge the facile ideas, prejudices, and lazy assumptions of the ambient culture.
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Alec Guinness: A Life, by Garry O'Connor
A definitive, revealing biography of actor Alec Guinness, whose career spanned much of the twentieth century. He appeared in seventy-seven films and fifty-five plays, acclaimed for such roles as Professor Marcus in The Lady Killers, Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars and George Smiley in le Carré’s Smiley’s People. He was an astonishingly gifted actor who became a British national treasure, familiar to many. Yet Guinness was a complex, thoughtful man, careful throughout his life to reveal little of the real self beneath the roles he assumed. He died with much of the truth still submerged. Garry O’Connor’s timely biography gives us the full story, including revelations on Guinness’s childhood, his secret relationships and the fears that haunted him throughout his life. Backed by O’Connor’s usual meticulous research, including interviews with Guinness himself and those close to him, this riveting account fills in the gaps, adding a new depth to our understanding not just of Guinness’s life but of his remarkable acting talent.
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Letters to Kafka, by Harry Greenberg
The funny, tragic, sometimes hilarious letters to a latterday Franz Kafka, whose insights into the existential dilemmas of contemporary being continue to be misunderstood, and sometimes dangerously so.
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Seeing is Believing, by Jon Elsby
Seeing is Believing develops themes touched on in an earlier book by the same author, Coming Home (also published by CentreHouse Press), but with greater focus on the relations between faith and culture, in the broadest sense. It’s a crucially important issue for our time, addressed by several American apologists, though very few on the UK side of the Atlantic have shown much interest in it. In fact, British Catholics in general – both clergy and laity, with only a handful of exceptions – have been content, in recent years, to leave apologetics to the Americans.
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Opus Thirty Three Bagatelles, by Peter Cowlam
Opus Thirty Three Bagatelles is a collection of ninety-nine finely crafted haikuesque poems, marked out for their candour and observational precision. ‘To be honest / all I recall / of home / is an array / of tiny / fruit trees / grown in endless / tidy /rows.’
‘I am reminded of T. E. Hulme’s imagist poems I discovered as a teenager through Herbert Read’s The True Voice of Feeling. These poems are a distillation of mood, atmosphere, feeling, expressed in a direct and surprising way.’ Garry O’Connor, author of The Vagabond Lover
‘I relish these sharply observed, finely concentrated moments of insight and wit.’ Catherine Belsey, author of Critical Practice
‘Poems sharp in definition, concise, deceptively simple and allusive.’ Eliza Granville, author of Gretel and the Dark
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The Emperor's Favourite Elephant, by Power McTeal
One day a sly and hungry jackal thinks to trick the Emperor’s favourite elephant into taking him to green and fertile pastures where he can get a good meal, without having to work for it. But he doesn’t bargain for the kind of destination the elephant has in store for him. Power McTeal’s eventful little tale of life in the wilds.
Available from Amazon Kindle USA, Amazon Kindle UK, from a choice of other ebook retailers here, and as an audiobook here.
The Butcher of Poland, a play by Garry O'Connor
Condemned to death and hanged in 1947, Hans Frank’s public repentance was unique among the leading Nazi criminals tried at Nuremberg. One psychiatrist pointed out Frank’s ‘beatific tranquillity merely hid his own tensions’. But what of such carefully acted out piety? Didn’t this hastily cultivated yet forceful and theatrical piety have something about it which was so patently flimsy compared to the much more formidable integrity and long studied piety of Pope Pius XII?
Both had their roots in South German and Italian theatricality. In the way Frank called attention to himself on every possible occasion he was no ordinary criminal. He was not only criminal in his acts and attitudes, which he acknowledged, but also he flaunted, in an egotistic, nihilistic way, a vanity of evils which today remain a significant part of our culture. Unlike Ribbentrop, who lamented he would never be able to write his ‘beautiful memoirs’, Frank wasted no time during the trial and had gone ahead. He composed his testament, Facing the Gallows, with a dedication from Goethe’s Werther, in quoting from which he subtly changed the wording to serve his self-serving account of ‘former and partial guilt’ – to make it sound as if God endorsed it, which was not in the sense of the original.
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A Forgotten Poet, by Peter Cowlam
A Forgotten Poet follows the fortunes of diffident and reluctant man of letters, Harold Humber, from his early life in the English Midlands, through his post-war career as economist, jazz aficionado, expert in industrial architecture, and, in the final reckoning, author of four slim volumes of popular verse. While still studying for his degree he is besotted by arts bombardier Hugh Monmouth. Monmouth is determined to see that his Exe Set – the name given his group of poets and writers – is written into English bookish history as the driving force in a changing literary landscape. Monmouth uses his family connections with London publishing house Sabre and Sabre to launch his friend Humber into print, and deliver him as ‘the most important poet writing in English now’. With the exception of certain historical and public figures all the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is purely imaginary. Available from Amazon Kindle USA, Amazon Kindle UK, from a choice of other ebook retailers here, and as an audiobook here. Audiobook narrated by the distinguished operatic baritone and voice artist Charles Johnston.