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THE SOUL

A History of the Human Mind

 

Penguin Random House

In The Soul: A History of the Human Mind I embark on a journey that has never been attempted: to restore the idea of the soul to the human story and to show how belief in, and beliefs arising from, the soul/mind have animated and driven our history.

Almost everyone thinks they have one, but nobody knows what it is.

Writing The Soul 
changed my life; reading it may change yours.

Paul Ham book cover - The Soul: A History of the Human Mind

NEW BOOK

OUT NOW

 Never had the world contended with a mind prepared to eliminate so many in the
name of a belief. ... Never had a country
pursued with such typhonic force the
obliteration of an entire ‘class’.
portrait of Paul Ham

BIOGRAPHY

Photo: Mark Friezer

Paul Ham

 

I'm a historian of conflict and of the ideas that people are willing to live and die for.

 

For most of my life as a writer, I’ve written about war and the causes of war. I’ve interviewed hundreds of soldiers and their families and their memories of war.

I’ve listened to the civilian victims of atrocities and the survivors of holocausts.

I’ve seen people at their most compassionate, ordinary men and women enacting the most powerful expression of self-sacrifice: ‘Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’

BOOK COLLECTION

REVIEWS

'Ham's conclusions [of Passchendaele] are well founded and damning. The novelist Richard Aldington concluded that, "Somehow we must atone to the dead". In his own way, the prolific and talented Paul Ham is
doing just that.'

The Royal United Services Institute

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