Word: koestler
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...feel like a character in a novel," Bill Clinton told an aide on the day the Lewinsky scandal broke. With equal parts self-pity and deceit, the President cast himself as the protagonist in Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler's 1941 classic about the victim of a totalitarian witch-hunt. Eight months later, in the pages of Kenneth Starr's report to Congress, Clinton finds himself the villain in a much trashier tale, a fetid blend of libido and legalese that reads like Jackie Collins by way of the Congressional Quarterly...
...both lists also had books in their top 10 that didn't even make the other's list. Radcliffe's fifth choice, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, wasn't on the Modern Library list, and Arthur Koestler Darkness at Noon, Modern Library's eighth choice, didn't make Radcliffe's top hundred...
...where does it all end? Possibly in a book. But Genovese plans no lengthy personal confessional, no breast-beating update of The God That Failed (1949), a book of essays by ex-communists that is best remembered for Arthur Koestler's mea culpa. He says he will return to the debate only if the discussion on the left stays alive. For him, the bottom line remains: the Question deserves an Answer...
...greater challenge was to stay mentally fit. He found comfort in recollections of Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler's classic novel about a prisoner locked in solitary confinement. After a while he began to reconstruct his own life story, then slowly recite, out loud, each heavily detailed chapter. "This is the verbal autobiography of Harvey Weinstein, aged 6," he intoned as he conjured up the memories of his first-grade teacher and long- forgotten classmates. Sometimes, however, the horror of his predicament got the best of him, and he cried out for his captors to kill him and leave...
...1950s I had already read Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Also historical accounts about Hitler; why he was never overthrown. I must say I was always against the system. We called it "contra" then. My parents were as well. My father is a bit red. But my mother made sure we were instructed as Catholics. There was always internal resistance. We thought the system could not last long, that we had to accept it as a result of the war, of Hitler's despotism and the cruelty of that regime. Yet we were always afraid of being denounced...