Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
126,840 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Journalism & Reportage, History, Politics & Society
How hard is Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil to read?
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Arendt writes clear, formal English, but German terms (Judenrat, Sprachregelung, RSHA ranks), legal Latin and SS titles pile up. It is plainer than Lolita yet more specialized than The Great Gatsby.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Long, parenthetical sentences carry quotations, qualifications and ironic asides. The prose is controlled and never fragmented, closer to Anna Karenina in length than to Faulkner.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- The book rests on concrete testimony, documents and named events, but its core concerns, conscience, responsibility and thoughtlessness, are philosophical. Bergen's essay stresses her work on thinking and judging.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Names, dates, ranks, offices, trials and footnote-like parentheses crowd every page, and she moves from Vienna to Madagascar to Wannsee to German resistance. The density is nearer to War and Peace than to Atomic Habits.
How Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is regarded
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil holds a literary regard score of 88 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.