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Overview
Conversations with Elie Wiesel is a far-ranging dialogue with the Nobel Peace Prize-winner on the major issues of our time and on life’s timeless questions.In open and lively responses to the probing questions and provocative comments of Richard D. Heffner—American historian, noted public television moderator/producer, and Rutgers University professor—Elie Wiesel covers fascinating and often perilous political and spiritual ground, expounding on issues global and local, individual and universal, often drawing anecdotally on his own life experience.
We hear from Wiesel on subjects that include the moral responsibility of both individuals and governments; the role of the state in our lives; the anatomy of hate; the threat of technology; religion, politics, and tolerance; nationalism; capital punishment, compassion, and mercy; and the essential role of historical memory.
These conversations present a valuable and thought-provoking distillation of the thinking of one of the world’s most important and respected figures—a man who has become a moral beacon for our time.
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
This is an intense and moving dialogue rising out of the ashes of the Holocaust and extending to the crucial issues of the present.
Publishers Weekly
Nobel Peace Prize winner, Holocaust survivor and prolific author Wiesel (Night; etc.) continues to challenge political injustices and to keep memories of the Holocaust alive in the interest of preventing further horror. Over several years, Wiesel appeared on the PBS show The Open Mind, hosted by his friend Heffner (A Documentary History of the United States), professor of communications and public policy at Rutgers. These conversations, culled from the show's transcripts and from a video series called Dialogues, cover everything from the role of the intellectual in public life to the state and nationalism, religion and politics, capital punishment and euthanasia. Throughout, Wiesel speaks with prophetic authority, philosophical wisdom and a storyteller's verve and vivacity. On changing values in language: "We don't talk. We shout.... The civility is gone; not only the tenderness, but the friendship in discourse... we have to start again to teach our contemporaries how to speak.... When language dies, then violence becomes another language." On capital punishment: "I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an agent of the Angel of Death." On the holocaust and memory: "people took the Holocaust and made it... commercial, they made it kitsch why not say it? kitsch. They trivialized it. In doing so, I think, they caused great harm and prejudice to memory." Always self-effacing, Wiesel repeatedly insists that he possesses no answers: "Actually, it's with questions I am good." These lively, engaging talks offer candid glimpses into the life and work of a leading moral thinker. (Nov. 1) Forecast: Wiesel's moral and intellectualclout will draw even more interest than usual in the wake of the terrible events of September 11. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.