Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm

This thoughtful and engrossing treatise on the nature of good and evil by the late Philip Hallie, a one-time philosophy professor of Wesleyan University, expands the study he began in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, a history of the French village of Le Chambon, whose Protestant townspeople protected 5000 Jews during WWII. He here briefly returns to Le Chambon to focus on Magda Trocme, who with her clergyman husband, Andre, organized the rescue, and Julius Schmahling, a German major who allowed the villagers to hide the Jews. Hallie also introduces Joshua James, a 19th-century Massachusetts sea captain who dedicated himself to saving shipwreck victims, and, in our own day, Katchen Coley, the organizer of a drug rehabilitation center in Connecticut. Throughout these stories, the author weaves his thoughts on choices involving ethical behavior and the darkness of human cruelty versus the wonder of those who come to the aid of strangers. Hallie's reflective commentary also deals with his struggle to understand his own ethical ambiguities. (Aug.)