Word: koestlers
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...long shelf of Koestler's work (six novels, 30 nonfiction books), no volume is as memorable or seems more likely to last. This searing tale of the Soviet Union's 1936-38 purge trials, and the gradual extraction of a false confession from an old revolutionary, proved profoundly persuasive to readers throughout the Western world. It was a bestseller in the U.S., and a 1951 dramatization by Sidney Kingsley, with Claude Rains in the central role, was a hit on Broadway. Following Darkness, Koestler wrote several powerfully antitotalitarian books, including Arrival and Departure (1943) and The Yogi...
...Koestler was never able to derive much joy from the past tense. He had seen his books vilified by Hitler's and Stalin's minions. Now he wished to hear no more about them. "The bitter passion has burned itself out," he decided. "Cassandra has gone hoarse and is due for a vocational change...
...after he had moved to England, Koestler turned his attention to anthropology, scientific phenomena and, ultimately, parapsychology. Recalling the "three out of every four friends" who had died or disappeared in the war, the Holocaust or the Gulag, he wrote, "Murder within the species is a phenomenon unknown in the whole animal kingdom, except for man and a few varieties of ants and rats." He sought explanations for human behavior outside the field of established science and attempted to revise ancient history. But scientists and critics were not always receptive...
...Thirteenth Tribe (1976), Koestler argued that many Eastern European Jews were descended not from the ancient Semites but from a Turkic national group in Eastern Europe that had converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. Isaac Bashevis Singer replied, "[He] tries so hard to show that the Jews are not even Jews, he fails also as a writer." Science Writer Martin Gardner, reviewing The Roots of Coincidence (1972), taxed the author with ignoring research that contradicts the claims of parapsychologists. Even Koestler's monumental and erudite The Act of Creation (1964) caused the eminent zoologist Sir Peter Medawar...
None of this slowed Koestler's production. He had been right so many times before; he had been attacked by so many who were now swept into the dustbin of history. Why should he care about the doubters? Indeed, as Koestler grew older, there was a marked change in the man. The fury and belligerence seemed to be ebbing. The bantam figure, who once seemed to be a walking history of modern European politics, appeared to be negotiating some new contract with the world...