The trial of Adolf Eichmann began in 1961 under a deceptively simple label, "criminal case 40/61." Hannah Arendt covered the trial for the "New Yorker" magazine and recorded her observations in "Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil." Harry Mulisch was also assigned to cover the trial for a Dutch news weekly. Arendt would later say in her book's preface that Mulisch was one of the few people who shared her views on the character of Eichmann. At the time, Mulisch was a young and little-known writer; in the years since he has since emerged as an author of major international importance, celebrated for such novels as "The Assault" and "The Discovery of Heaven."Mulisch modestly called his book on case 40/61 a report, and it is certainly that, as he gives firsthand accounts of the trial and its key players and scenes (the defendant's face strangely asymmetric and riddled by tics, his speech absurdly baroque). Eichmann's character comes out in his incessant bureaucratizing and calculating, as well as in his grandiose visions of himself as a Pontius Pilate-like innocent. As Mulisch intersperses his dispatches from Jerusalem with meditative accounts of a divided and ruined Berlin, an eerily rebuilt Warsaw, and a visit to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, "Criminal Case 40/61, the Trial of Adolf Eichmann" becomes as a disturbing and highly personal essay on the Nazi extermination of European Jews and on the human capacity to commit evil ever more efficiently in an age of technological advancement.Here presented with a foreword by Deborah Dwork and translated for the first time into English, "Criminal Case 40/61" provides the reader with an unsettling portrait not only of Eichmann's character but also of technological precision and expertise. It is a landmark of Holocaust writing.

Why is the broad avenue leading to St. Peter's called the Street of Reconciliation? What does the Via dei Fori Imperiali - where the ancient imperial forums lie - have to do with Mussolini? How does the name Piazza Navona disclose what is hidden under the square? Via Roma tells Rome's secrets one street at a time. In this brilliant guide, Willemijn van Dijk takes readers across time and place as they wander along the roads of the ancient Italian capital. Street by street, fifty of them, van Dijk allows the stones to reveal their origins, their makers, the significance of their names, and the history they continue to echo. Caesars, popes, dictators, mafia dons, generals, philosophers, and artists. Architecture, ideas, romance, food, and intrigue. Rome is the eternal city to which all roads lead, and van Dijk unfolds the city's rich past through those roads. Via Roma is an indispensable book for any and every inquisitive lover, and visitor, of the city along the Tiber.