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Stacy Horn's forthcoming book, "The Killing Fields of East New York," reveals how a 1970s white-collar crime spree transformed a Brooklyn neighborhood into the city's deadliest. Below, Horn recommends books that reset a reader's understanding of evil and complicity.
'The Glass Hotel' by Emily St. John Mandel (2020)
How do people like Bernie Madoff live with themselves after knowingly destroying many lives? This novel, a subtle masterpiece with a Ponzi scheme at its center, shows evil's complexity and how we all become to some extent corrupted. Everyone is trapped by forces within and without. We transcend those forces to the degree we're able to, or, in many cases, not at all. Buy it here.
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'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
Another masterpiece, this novel depicts the various attitudes ordinary people assume in order to go about their lives in the face of unspeakable injustice. Ishiguro's characters are also trapped at different points on a spectrum of evil, some directly participating in a ghastly cloning operation, others discovering it to be horrifying, but moving on. Buy it here.
'All the Light We Cannot See' by Anthony Doerr (2014)
Doerr's World War II novel somehow manages to be enchanting and hopeful while exploring the moral ambiguities we encounter along the bell curve of evil. A captivating array of answers to impossible questions. Buy it here.
'Shot in the Heart' by Mikal Gilmore (1994)
Detectives who investigate unsolved homicides, I have learned, do not always hate the murderers they capture. Gilmore's story of his family, and of his brother who was executed for murder, is a heartbreaking account of the origins of evil and how hate is sometimes not the most enlightened or productive response. Buy it here.
'The Chickenshit Club' by Jesse Eisinger (2017)
How do the "good guys" live with themselves when they repeatedly let unrepentant criminals go, enabling them to ruin more lives? This book explains why we don't prosecute financial criminals. Learning of the gradual "boiling frog" enfeebling of the Justice Department is painful. Buy it here.
'Poverty, by America' by Matthew Desmond (2023)
Poverty in America persists, Desmond illustrates, because the rest of us benefit when our country does "so much more to subsidize affluence than to alleviate poverty." We all fall somewhere on the bell curve of evil, and the fact that we don't take this seriously is perhaps the greatest evil. We should do more. Buy it here.
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