Review by Booklist Review
Morrow, a columnist with Time magazine, offers a compelling look at how our concepts of evil have changed over the ages, influenced by literature, history, culture, technology, and, of course, religion. He explores the elusive qualities of evil and how difficult it is to define. He avows that most of us would apply Justice Potter Stewart's test of pornography--we know it when we see it. Morrow recalls evil deeds and doers from Caligula to Hitler and the Holocaust to the terrorism and axis of evil that is President Bush's current focus. Evil is most often closely identified with the other, leading to violence against women accused of witchcraft or ethnic minorities. Drawing on stories he has heard or covered as a reporter, including conversations about serial killers and shocking discoveries about the neighbors next door, Morrow examines the subject on micro and macro levels, as a part of human nature, as a necessity for providing the world's narrative energy, and as a counterpoint to good. Morrow's writing is elegant and conversational, like talking to a thoughtful, learned friend as he discusses how concepts of evil have evolved through history, politics, literature, and mundane daily life. --Vanessa Bush Copyright 2003 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Heart, a memoir centering on his heart attacks, Morrow asked questions about the nature of evil as it relates to illness and death. This foray into evil generally is a thing of snippets rather than sustained case building. Morrow, author of more than 150 Time cover stories, begins by responding to a variety of events, some of them on the scale of the Holocaust and September 11, others more modest, such as several particularly gruesome murders and the shootings at Columbine, trying to grasp where evil inheres. He then wanders through a mass of heartfelt but turgid sentiments, from which it is possible to extract a few conclusions about his opinions: evil exists; people may be evil; deeds may be evil even when people are not; there are degrees of evil, great and small, justifiable and unjustifiable. Franz Fanon's liberation-through-violence ideology and the cult of the Marquis de Sade are evil, for Morrow, and so are thinkers who praise either. And so on. The book rises above this level occasionally, as in his portrait of several individuals who resist classification, and supports another conclusion: that we have to talk about evil. At other times, Morrow descends to the level of mere name-dropping, as in his portrayal of a Stockholm conference on international violence. One can extract from this book a reasonably favorable opinion of Morrow's thoughtfulness and personal ethics, but he does not offer much exploration in the direction of possible solutions, nor has he been rigorous in sifting his reflections for lucidity. Anybody who wants to keep up on impassioned screeds in pop ethics will find something to like here, but much religious thought on the matter, to take one example, goes undiscussed. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Impressionistic, sometimes glancing ponderings on evil as theological construct, historical fact, and journalistic staple. The E word makes for a big subject, and it gets batted around a lot among politicians ("evil empire," "axis of evil") and pundits. Time.com columnist Morrow (Heart: A Memoir, 1995) weighs in with a declaration that evil, which he never quite defines, is a reality--though, echoing a trope from The Usual Suspects, he adds, "Evil has made a successful career over many centuries by persuading people that it does not exist." In the pages that follow, Morrow expands on that argument in several directions. Some are quite helpful for anyone seeking to understand why bad things happen to good people: Evil, writes Morrow, is a normal part of life; evil is committed by ordinary folks just as often as by criminal masterminds, and ordinary people can do considerably more damage when they set about misbehaving; young people are more evil than old ones (though perhaps only because evil youngsters get killed off before they can become evil seniors). Others veer into the bizarre, as when Morrow posits that the Third Reich was "an evil national mirthlessness," layering it on with the still stranger thought that "no people with a decent sense of humor would have tolerated Hitler and his grotesque crew and absurd racial theories for five minutes." Do funny folks then have no evil in them? So Morrow suggests before going on to pummel the late Kurt Cobain for having committed a few creepy sexual images to print (failing to consider that Cobain may have been trying on a literary mask or two) and the present culture in general for having produced Cobain, Columbine, and other monstrous entries in Morrow's hall of shame. In all this, the author fails to provide a specific mailing address for evil, whose image remains a bit fuzzy. Even so, this is a good--and readable--selection from its rÉsumÉ. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
