BOOKS IN BRIEF

The Roots of Evil by John Kekes (Cornell University Press, 261 pp., $29.95) In the face of "softhearts" who believe that not even a ruthless terrorist is an evildoer, John Kekes seeks in The Roots of Evil to articulate why people commit evil and why evildoers should be held accountable. Crafting a "secular realist" explanation of iniquity, he avoids both "esoteric" Christian/Platonic accounts of good and evil and Pollyannaish Enlightenment notions about the perfectibility of man provided he is properly introduced to reason.

Selecting six situations of evil--ranging from the Albigensian crusade to Robespierre's Reign of Terror to Charles Manson's rampages--Kekes, in intellectual fashion, provides possible excuses and rationalizations, before affirming that, indeed, such actions, and the actors involved, were evil.

Kekes's subsequent discussion of the roots of peccancy is lucid, though prone to frustrating repetition. Describing common explanations of evil, ranging from religious to biological, he attempts to refute each. He claims that evil, rather, is the product of a blend of sundry factors--both internal (e.g., individual will) and external (e.g., upbringing). Kekes deems his theory, which removes the supernatural from the discussion while maintaining the real existence of evil, more accurate than those offered by anyone else in history, as he incorporates--or rejects--aspects of theories developed by thinkers ranging from Aquinas to Kant to Arendt.

In addition to pure "rationality," Kekes claims that envy and boredom often lead to evildoing, particularly in the contemporary West (in the Middle Ages there was not much time to allow for "casual" evil). The reintroduction of the "moral imagination" (a term coined by Edmund Burke) into education may help folks resist the thrill of evil, he suggests. Such a humanistic, nonreligious imagination will allow people in prosperous societies to find fulfilling alternatives--bowling, perhaps--to evildoing.

Kekes calls for a secular movement "toward elementary decency," as he attacks relativists who grow squeamish at the suggestion that evil exists. His dislike of such moral lightweights is evident in a few gems of invective--crisp, entertaining sentences that stand out in a work of generally stoical logic.

Kekes believes that his realistic, nuanced approach to evil will better equip society to mitigate its effects, make it less likely to occur, and punish the perpetrators. Though many surely will disagree with his arguments, he provides a compelling perspective.

--Joseph Lindsley

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, (Little, Brown, 642 pp., $25.95) Ah, the sweet mystery of hype. Publishers Weekly has proclaimed Elizabeth Kostova's first novel as the one sleeper work to emerge from summer as a blockbuster. "The it book of the season if not the year seems to have appeared," writes editor in chief Sara Nelson.

Nelson describes a "carefully calibrated advertising campaign" that landed The Historian as number one on the PW bestseller list as well as the New York Times's. In less than a month, Little, Brown went back to press three times and currently has more than 800,000 copies of the book in print.

The publishers are so giddy over the sales figures that they recently took out a full-page ad in the Arts section of the Times, declaring The Historian "destined for immortality." And yes, the book has of course been optioned by Hollywood, and foreign rights have been sold in 28 countries.

So, what's got everyone in such a twitter? For starters, some 7,000 advance reading copies were sent forth sometime in the spring--including one to me. And after some couple hundred pages, I simply couldn't take it any longer--I who in the course of careers in publishing and moviemaking have made my way through more soul-numbing prose than any human ought to have faced.

But the publicity taunted me. I went out, bought a copy (I'd long since given away the copy sent me), and pressed through the whole thing. Kostova's premise is that Dracula has been walking around the world since the late fifteenth century, biting folks in the neck to turn them into the undead. At the risk of being a vile spoiler, you're going to have to navigate some 576 pages to discover why.

You're going to have to wade through passages like: "Despite its famously frustrating incompleteness, the Zacharias 'Chronicle,' with the embedded 'Tale of Stefan the Wanderer,' is an important source of confirmation of Christian pilgrimage routes in the fifteenth-century Balkans, as well as information about the fate of the body of Vlad III 'Tepes' of Wallachia, long believed to have been buried at the monastery on Lake Snagov (in present-day Romania)."

Kostova takes readers on the long trip of a daughter trying to find her father who is trying to find a colleague who has gone missing in a quest for the dread Dracula. The father leaves long written messages for the daughter. The missing colleague leaves hidden diaries. Trains are taken. Airplanes are flown.Tea is drunk. Coffee is drunk. Cafés are sat in. And so it goes on and on and on for all those hundreds of pages.

--Cynthia Grenier