Word: koestlers
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...prose and poetry are used in thousands of state and private schools. Instead of the usual diet of Wordsworth and Silas Marner, the students get kitchen-sink selections from Hemingway on the birth of a baby, D. H. Lawrence on a son's quarrel with his mother, Koestler on a Communist execution, Joyce on a Dublin funeral. Holbrook's first book on education-combining theory, sample student compositions, and Holbrook's interpretations of their efforts-is required reading at most teacher-training colleges. As his just-published third book, The Secret Places, shows, his instructional message never...
Crusader & Yogi. In many Western eyes, Buddhism is socially useless. It has only a limited tradition of good works; the chief duty of monks and nuns is contemplation. In The Lotus and the Robot, Arthur Koestler says of Oriental mysticism in general: "The messianic arrogance of the Christian crusader is matched by the Yogi's arrogant attitude of detachment towards human suffering...
...internal-combustion engine, not by invention but by refinement. The modern subtlety is the obscene symbiosis in which interrogator and victim cooperate willingly in an elaborate pretense of the victim's guilt. And the basic document of this condition is the long dialogue between Rubashov and Gletkin in Koestler's Darkness at Noon...
What is horrifying about the Koestler novel is that the reader becomes convinced that in Rubashov's place he himself would become a complying victim. Anyone in the 20th century can become a victim; that needs no further proof. But a further evil is possible, Irish Writer Victor Price argues in this thoughtful first novel. What Price suggests is that anyone, bound up in the tangled complicities of corrupting power, may become an interrogator. Price's hero is Hugh Barbour, a classicist who escapes from his academic hide-hole into a job interrogating Greek prisoners for the British...
Author Price writes just well enough to sharpen the reader's disappointment that he does not write better. The love affair is a fleshy banality, and Price's examination of the interrogator at work falls far short of Koestler's hard clarity. The best of the book shows the British army, all aclank with methodical, motorized idiocy, snark hunting after terrorists in the villages of Cyprus. Price's half-developed central idea leads disturbingly to the suspicion that if civilization does come to a halt, the last moving parts will have been not the generals...