Word: koestlers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Arrow in the Blue" is a puzzling book. Often it seems to leave the realm of autobiography to become an elongated essay, a psychological novel, or a volume of modern history. At times only the personal pronoun reminds us that this is Arthur Koestler writing about himself. The casual reader will have a difficult time integrating the many facets of this book, but the more perceptive will realize that this is one of the best pieces of autobiographical writing to emerge in recent years...
...categorize "Arrow in the Blue" as just another confession of a former CP member would be doing Koestler an injustice. Most of those Saturday Evening Post type chronicles picture their writers as poor, misguided aesthetes who took Marx as their personal savior, and who have learned the hard way that McCarthyism is the only road to the good life. Koestler's self-analysis is of a different sort. It is both penetrating and brutal...
...importance of Arthur Koestler is the importance of a man caught in the heart of a holocaust who survives to bear witness. Koestler's holocaust was also that of much of European civilization, and Koestler has already borne eloquent witness to it in half a dozen political novels (The Gladiators, Darkness at Noon) and several politico-mystical tracts (The Yogi and the Commissar, Insight and Outlook...
...Koestler has chosen to give still more specific testimony in the form of his autobiography. Arrow in the Blue. Volume I. published this week, firmly demonstrates that he was not overbold to attempt a self-summation so early. In this volume alone, which carries him only to his 27th year, Author Koestler lives as many lives as most men do in their full span...
...Morning After. Thereupon, in December 1931, Arthur suffered another metaphysical revolution. He joined the Communist Party. He had, so he thought, good reason. The Nazis were coming to power in Germany, and to Koestler it seemed that only the Communists could hold out against them. More generally, the party offered him a release for his "state of Chronic Indignation" at "a polluted society." Even so, a run of irrelevant bad luck at that time had some other "field that awaits the plow of the Lord...