Word: authority
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rebel without a cause. In the '305, he was a Communist; in the '40s and well into the '50s, a trenchant antiCommunist. While he remains as firmly anti-Red as ever, he seems to have wearied of the battle. A few years ago, the author of Darkness at Noon announced: "Cassandra has gone hoarse and is due for a vocational change." Lately, the polemicist has turned pedagogue. The Sleepwalkers is an animated and diverting lecture on cosmology, man's vision of the universe from the Babylonians to Newton...
...recording the hammer blows of 16th and 17th century discoveries that finally put Ptolemy's epicycle machine on science's junk heap, Author Koestler offers personable profiles of the leading cosmologists-Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo-as well as lively popularizations of their thought. He also makes his book's mildly controversial point, which is almost beside the point, that these scientific greats sleepwalked their way to profound insights, with a kind of intuitive genius that turned even wrong questions into right answers...
...telescope he asked for, that influences Koestler's frank distaste for Galileo. Far from being a martyr, Koestler believes, Galileo was a pompous megalomaniac, who alienated his Jesuit friends and the benevolence of Pope Urban VIII, until he forced his own trial. But in the main, Author Koestler is equable-tempered and gives Galileo full marks for crumbling the Aristotelian notion of the eternal immutability of the upper heavens...
What mankind now needs, Author Koestler strongly implies, is a great sleepwalker who could resolve the tragic and longstanding schism between science and faith. Otherwise, he fears, science will become simply "the new Baal, lording it over the moral vacuum with his electronic brain...
...Speech after long silence, it is right," wrote Yeats in a poem about the gulf between the sexes. Author Janeway's novel deals with the same subject, but unfortunately it consists of speech after long speech. Most of the talk is mournful, and most of it is carried on by women. There are men in the novel, who say "what the hell" quite often, but they are neither very important nor very real. They are the book's furniture, and when one of them stabs himself, the reader is merely baffled, as if a sofa had suddenly stood...