Tales of good and evil, help and harm

About this book

Tales of Good and Evil focuses 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 ambiguous 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 organization devoted to rehabilitating 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.