In a remote pocket of Nazi-held France, ordinary people risked their lives to rescue many hundreds of strangers, mostly Jewish children. Was this a fluke of history, or something more? Anthropologist Maggie Paxson, certainties shaken by years of studying strife, arrives on the Plateau to explore this phenomenon: What are the traits that make a group choose selflessness?
A quick summary might make Maggie Paxson’s The Plateau sound too earnest to bear ... But something surprising and beautiful happens in these pages. Paxson braids those strands of history, philosophy and reflection into a book that is precious and powerful ... Paxson is a descriptive essayist who can make readers feel the chill of a wintry French gale or the airlessness of a boxcar headed to a German death camp or her own heart breaking as she confronts other examples of human depravity, many involving refugees from around the world who find themselves at the Plateau. She’s evocative without being flowery, philosophical without being weighty. And political? Not overtly ... Some readers might not like the way she meanders from topic to topic, but she never really loses her focus.
...one-of-a-kind ... a lyrical book, by turns ungainly and graceful, dark and uplifting—right in step with the struggle 'to be good when it’s hard to be good.'