Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt (1951)

Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

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It’s interesting the number of books that came out in the last few years about fascism and authoritarian governments. This is obviously not one of them, and also not one that fully fits within that new mini-genre. Totalitarianism is not of course a partisan issue, and while there are distinct brands within it with Stalinism/Maoism representing the “”””Left”””” and Fascism representing the “”””Right”””” the understanding you would most likely take away from this book is that ideology has very little to do with any of […]

Justice Is a Matter of Judgment

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt

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First published in 1963 as a series of articles in The New Yorker, this is philosopher Hannah Arendt’s report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann admitted to being one of the major organizers of the Holocaust but denied any guilt in the criminal sense because he had only been following orders in a system that did not allow disobedience. He was sentenced to death and executed by hanging in 1962. Huge controversies broke out over this account of the trial […]

Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme

Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt

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It’s hard to rate this book because to read it is to immediately enter into the debate and controversy over it. A controversy, conversely, that I didn’t actually know anything about going into. The book is a reportage and essay series printed initially in The New Yorker during the months and subsequent years of the Eichmann trial in Israel. Eichmann was “arrested” in Argentina by Israeli nationals and brought back to Israel to stand on multiple counts. The arrest itself was not entirely sanctioned because […]



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