Customer Reviews

In the Eye of the Hurricane: Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm

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This book describes several types of risky, potentially self-sacrificing, life-saving behavior: a village in France that sheltered Jewish refugees during WW II, a German commander who looked the other way, a 19th-century Massachusetts sailor who saved dozens of people from shipwrecks, and a modern drug counselor (though her story doesn't really fit in with the other stories very well, since her efforts were apparently not as successful).

The most interesting thing about this book is how little Hallie's heroes/heroines have in common: some were religious, some secular, some quiet people who led boring lives (other than the lifesaving of course), some wild and a little self-destructive. Ultimately, Hallie leaves the impression that this sort of self-sacrificing goodness is as much a mystery as is evil.

While J. Brown is entitled to his -- or her -- opinion, it is laughable to suggest that Hallie is unintelligent.

"Mr. Hallie was born in Chicago and served in the Army field artillery from 1944 to 1945, earning three battle stars in the European theater of operations. He received a bachelor's degree from Grinnell College in Iowa, master's and a doctoral degrees from Harvard University and a bachelor of literature degree from Jesus College, Oxford, where he was a Fulbright scholar from 1949 to 1951."

- NY Times obituary.

In that circumstance, posting clever -- and inapplicable -- 'bon mots' about irony just invite ripostes in kind. To whit J. Brown might have done "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." Thank you Abraham Lincoln.

For those wrestling with the problem of evil -- and personal evil is the only place where one can hope to change anything, says Marie Louise von Franz, Jung's collaborator, in the Jung film Matter of Heart, -- Philip Hallie did very important work.

"The hope to change the world is a childish illusion." - Marie Louise von Franz - Matter of Heart.

His chapter on Cruelty - the cruelty of the torturer, the murderer and the genocidaire -- so relevant today -- in Facing Evil, by Harry Wilmer, and his reply to Jeffrey Burton Russell's talk in another chapter, were utterly extraordinary and tremendously valuable.

Hallie said of Frederick Douglass's meeting with his old and dying former master, Auld, "In Frederick Douglass's case, it was an entirely different mode of power. It was a whole range, a symphonic range, the powers that I'm not going to go into now. It began with fighting Covey the slavebreaker. The range of his idea of power was so great that after Frederick's emancipation, he went back to his old master and saw him just before the master died. His power was immense at that moment. He was loving. These are the three things that I learned about that crushing and grinding." (the crushing and grinding that is cruelty).

This from a man who says in the same chapter that he enjoyed killing during World War 2 and seeing beautiful decapitated German heads lying in the street, or people hit with phosphorous shells running in the streets, burning while still alive.

Hallie did important work on evil. From the only basis from which such work can be done. From his own evil. Which is all that any of us can do and what many of us must do.

Did Hallie criticize Thoreau? Was that criticism justified? Did he misinterpret Thoreaus's use of language? Or did J. Brown misinterpret his words? Is J. Brown's argument valid? There is certainly scope for investigation. But one thing is very certain. Hallie was exceptionally intelligent, he was even more honest and he was subtle in his thought.

He was also extremely valuable as a thinker and teacher and is so again, today, as US people wake up to the reality of murderous violence, torture, death squads and genocide that underlies the US empire and as they now search for guidance.

They can find that very great Americans have been there before them and have spent many decades to answer the very same questions that the US people must now answer for themselves.

Questions like "Why did I tolerate this? Why did I allow this to be done in my name? Why did I not speak out?"

Very great Americans like Philip Hallie, Frederick Douglass, Joseph Campbell, Harry Wilmer and many, many more.

I'm only writing this review about two chapters, those dealing with Henry David Thoreau. This book will gain (is gaining) much hype and is being assigned, on numerous syllabi, in contrast to Thoreau. Hallie grossly simplifies Thoreau's thought, and I'd caution the student looking at both to read Thoreau's "Plea for Captain John Brown" and "Civil Disobedience" before heeding Hallie's criticism. In his other book, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, Hallie writes about a village that became a stop on an "Underground Railroad" for Jews escaping the Holocaust. Yet, in this book, he makes no mention of Thoreau's (and Emerson's, and Alcott's) own contribution to America's own Underground Railroad.

Meanwhile, Hallie seems to have trouble with the English language. Again and again, he criticizes Thoreau for his use of terms like "vulgar sadness," concluding that Thoreau himself thinks that all sadness is vulgar. Hallie doesn't seem to understand that vulgar is an adjective and that, in using it, Thoreau is therefore writing about a particular kind of sadness: that kind of sadness which is vulgar. In Hallie's black and white ethical world, such subtleties aren't allowed.

I could say much more about the Thoreau chapters in this book, but I should, instead, just point out a fact from Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. In that book Hallie reports that a villager from Le Chambon confronts him with something like the words "Don't talk to me of good. I wasn't trying to do good." In essence, this villager is giving him the same message that Thoreau was trying to express: compassion cannot bear to be sentimentalized. The irony of the similarity between this villager's view and Thoreau's is staring Hallie right in the face, but he doesn't see it. One reason for this might be that Hallie appears to have little sensitivity to irony at all. (To get a clue what this lack of sensitivity to irony means, consider that, in a dictionary of literary terms written in the 1940s, the authors wrote that "An awareness of irony is one of the hallmarks of an intelligent mind.")