The Spinoza Problem

Set across two eras three centuries apart, the novel by psychiatrist and novelist Irvin D. Yalom takes its premise from a school punishment. Summoned by his headmaster over anti-Semitic remarks in a speech, the sixteen-year-old Alfred Rosenberg must learn passages on Spinoza from Goethe's autobiography by heart, and he is stunned to learn that his idol admired the Jewish philosopher. The puzzle stays with Rosenberg as he rises to become a Nazi ideologue and the main author of the Third Reich's racial policy. The novel also takes up the life of Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated by Amsterdam's Jewish community in 1656 at twenty-four for his religious views, who lived poor and isolated yet wrote works that changed history.

Actor Sir Anthony Hopkins endorsed it as the most intriguing novel he had read in many years, praising it as both tense and highly informative.