Otto Adolf Eichmann, one of the SS commanders responsible for organizing the so-called "final solution," was tried in 1961 in Jerusalem, having committed crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and war crimes under the Nazi regime. Hannah Arendt attended the trial as a correspondent for the "New Yorker," and the result is an uncomfortable book that asks the questions we never wanted to ask and gives answers that lack the reassuring certainty of easy Manichaeism. His account, Ezio Mauro explains in his preface, is "an attempt to recover a human measure of rationality that would allow the world to be sent forward after Auschwitz": it is a careful and passionate exploration of the historical and political context, an analysis of the Nazi time, indispensable for understanding how that ordinary and mediocre everyday life could become an instrument of horror.