Word: koestlers
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...chestnut but a whole treeful: the sexual odyssey of a bachelor girl, the political disillusionment of a onetime Communist, the maladjustment of the overeducated modern woman. She succeeds in creating a remarkable heroine (possibly her alter ego) who somehow manages believably to combine the qualities of Kitty Foyle, Arthur Koestler and Simone de Beauvoir. Like Mrs. Lessing, Heroine Anna Wulf is a divorced writer who explains, in four different notebooks, why she is too troubled to write. Her black notebook looks back to an African experience that led to her first novel. The red records her political and intellectual life...
...dismal prisons, Home Secretary Richard Austen Butler announced his newest device for rehabilitating gaolbirds: a $280 prize for the best original literary, artistic or musical composition produced behind bars. Unmentioned, at his own request, was the instigator and donor of the award: Author Arthur (Darkness at Noon) Koestler, 56. whose Dialogue with Death and Scum of the Earth grew out of his own imprisonment by the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War and by Vichy France during World...
...Koestler's efforts at saving Western Civilization were about as purposeful as the Children's Crusades and not nearly as well organized. He explains in the preface to his book that what emerged from his study of the East is a "mixture of pedantic detail and sweeping generalizations." Written in all modesty, it applies in all honesty...
...initial shock of discovering the squalor in India seems to have obscured the original purpose of the "pilgrimage;" Mr. Koestler ends up explaining what should be done to cure the ills of India and completely abandons the possibility that the country might have some lesson to offer the West. Having thus disposed of the total of Indian culture in 162 pages, the "pilgrim" is ready for his journey to Japan...
...Koestler is immediately impressed by the beauty of the Japanese islands, but he is also troubled by the Western modernization of that country. It is this combination of the ancient--the Lotus--and the modern--the Robot--which gave Mr. Koestler the title for his book. He apparently decided that the latter was the more dominant of the two forces, and expresses grave misgivings about the psychological instability which the Robot has forced upon the Japanese people. After surmising that the Japanese are not capable of coping with their own spiritual and philosophical problems, Mr. Koestler very neatly dismisses another...