Robert Jay Lifton

"With unusual access to former Aum members, Lifton has produced a study of the inner life of a modern millennial cult, offering a subtle portrait of how guru and disciples reinforce each other's wildest destructive fantasies. Lifton offers a sobering exploration of how Aum's guru, Shoko Asahara - charismatic leader, con man, madman - created a religion from a global stew of New Age thinking, ancient religious practices, and apocalyptic science fiction; of how he recruited scientists as disciples and set them to producing the "poor man's atomic bomb" (chemical and biological weapons). Through Aum, Lifton explores a historically unprecedented phenomenon, a twenty-first century in which cults and terrorists may be able to create their own holocausts."--BOOK JACKET. "Taking stock as well of Charles Manson, the Heaven's Gate cult, and the Oklahoma City bombers, Lifton argues that Aum Shinrikyo was not just a "nightmare of Japanese religion," but a global nightmare that revealed a world unexpectedly at risk."--BOOK JACKET.

A study of the events surrounding the Hiroshima bombing focuses on its effects in America, considering the cover-up efforts by the government and linking the bombing to current insensitivities toward violence.

The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide was written by Robert Jay Lifton and published in 1986, analyzing the role of German doctors in carrying out a genocide. In the work Lifton details the medical procedures occurring before and during the Holocaust and explores the paradoxical theme of healing killing in which one race was healed by eliminating another; a concept that many used to morally justify their actions. Throughout the book, Lifton provides quotes from interviews he conducted with SS doctors and with victims. The book was awarded the 1987 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 1987 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. (Source: [Wikipedia](

Examines the psychological and cultural significance of death.

A personal account by the Harvard Medical School lecturer and political activist traces his explorations into the psychological sources and consequences of some of the past half-century's most disturbing events as experienced by its victims and perpetrators.