I haven't read Eichmann in Jerusalem yet, but this appears to be be designed as a mirror image to it - the banality of conscientious dissent. We get portraits of four particular individuals: the Swiss police captain who forged documents to allow more Jewish refugees to escape, the Serb who quietly extended compassion to Croats in 1991 in Vukovar, the Israeli soldier who decided to refuse to serve occupied territories, and a broker who refused to participate in a Ponzi scheme. Press lays emphasis on the ordinariness of these resisters and how unexceptional people can break ranks to resist evil.

In every society, there are rebels and iconoclasts who don't share the moral code to which of most of their fellow citizen subscribe... The resisters featured in these pages are not among them. Their problem was not that airily dismissed the values and ideals of the societies they lived in or the organizations they belonged to, but that they regarded them as inviolable."