Eyal Press's Beautiful Souls has been selected as the inaugural Penn State Reads common text. It's a personal, probing look into the lives of a few people who have had the misfortune of encountering situations and times in which they have felt compelled to make moral decisions that place them in opposition to the voices of authority. Press recounts stories most of us have never heard before, such as that of Paul Grüninger, a Swiss police commander whose life was changed forever--for the worse--when he found that he could not refuse to allow Jewish refugees into Switzerland in 1938. And later, Leyla Wydler's ordeal. She worked in the financial planning industry, and had landed a fabulous job with Stanford Financial Group, only to discover that the CD's she was pressured to peddle were part of a Ponzi scheme. For a single mother of two, life would have been so much easier to look the other way and continue to rake in the bucks. Leyla Wydler knew what poverty felt like, and she still put her livelihood at risk.

While reading Eyal Press's book, I got the feeling that he not only interviewed these people (except for Grüninger, deceased since 1972), but got to know them as friends. It's warmly written, a beautiful tribute to these beautiful souls.