"With his lissome prose, Ryrie is a brilliant guide in the best of the essayist tradition, who empowers us to face the formidable moral questions of our age not as victims but through critical self-examination, ethical reflection, and compassionate action. Who are we? The appeal to self-awareness is neither otherworldly nor moralizing. Rather, like the great Montaigne, Ryrie meets us in the middle of his and our lives, offering rich and humane historical reflections as wisdom in our consumerist, perpetually online, and post-truth realities. This is an extraordinary book with which you don't need to be in full agreement to emerge radically transformed into a more enlightened and charitable person in a fraught age."

Bruce Gordon, Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Yale Divinity School

“We live amid alarming fractures in the public understanding of our identities, our collective needs, and our perils. Ryrie’s little book of contemporary history manages to be both exhilarating and comforting, based on his rare skill in bringing a historian’s cool gaze on our anxious world to assess its ills, and with due modesty to offer some remedial ways forward.”

Diarmaid MacCulloch, emeritus professor of the history of the church, University of Oxford

"A brilliant exposition of Hitler’s role as the embodiment of evil in the collective imagination of the West—and of what may happen as it starts to fade."

Tom Holland, author of "Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind"

"Rapidly, provocatively, this book shakes the history of the last few decades into a new and persuasive shape, and asks the question we all need to answer: how shall we orient ourselves, how shall we understand good and evil, when the old taboos are breaking down, and the horrors of the past are losing their strength as guardrails?"

Francis Spufford, author of "Red Plenty" and the Booker Prize–longlisted "Light Perpetual"