Evil Men

James Dawes

“This extraordinary book is by turns horrifying, enraging, and disturbing. Dawes both brings us into the thought world of criminals against humanity and simultaneously reminds us of the impossibility of entering anyone’s mind with any kind of confidence. Evil Men grapples with the impossible challenge of making meaning of what it sees; but most important, Dawes’s gaze never wavers.”—Noah R. Feldman, Harvard Law School

“Evil Men lies well outside the boundaries of established academic discourse, and the form of the book is extraordinary in many ways. James Dawes not only probes the depths of the human capacity for atrocity, but also explores in an altogether original and nearly unrepeatable way the human capacity for sympathy or empathy with those whose acts have placed them beyond the pale of civilized society.”—Geoffrey Harpham, National Humanities Center

“James Dawes writes a deep, broad meditation on violence from Arendt to Zimbardo, from atrocity to forgiveness, the paradoxes of representation and the tears of war, sincere and otherwise. These Japanese men tell disturbing stories that will not let one go. While capturing their motives with a social scientist’s eye for causality, Dawes draws out the violent particulars with a novelist’s eye for personal meaning, self-care, and philosophical significance. This is a rare achievement. There are less than one hundred and fifty cases where torturers speak fully in their own words, and none that are written with such literary self-consciousness.”—Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy

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