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INSIGHT AND OUTLOOK (442 pp.)-Arthur Koestler-Macmillan...
Budapest-born (1905) Arthur Koestler, one of the best political-novelists of the last decade (Darkness at Noon), is also a stubborn, highly independent thinker-a religious skeptic whose materialism is spiced with idealistic fervor, a radical in search of something to replace his lost faith in Communism. In The Yogi and the Commissar (TIME, June 4, 1945) Koestler tried to find a workable compromise between the pure, but passive life of the sage, and the earthy, but highly active existence of the political reformer. In his new book he stabs at a more ambitious project-"an inclusive theory...
...Koestler has had the project in mind for 20 years. For the last five, he has been reading himself up to date, and his new book's fat bibliography ranges from Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (by Maud Bodkin) to The Hypothalamus and Central Levels of Autonomic Function (by the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Diseases). Unfortunately, Insight and Outlook is likely to be gobbledygook to the average reader and without much meat even for the most dogged philosopher...
Tickle, Tickle. Koestler wants to show what forces cause human beings to think, to create and to destroy. As a "back door" into this problem, he begins by examining the forces that make men laugh. He shows, with the help of a number of geometric diagrams and a lot of peeking into the plumbing of "the sympathico-adrenal system," that laughter is a form of self-assertion. This section of the book also notes some pedagogical experiments in what Koestler gravely calls "the functioning of the original squirm reflex"-a phenomenon further documented in his book by laboratory experiments...
...Another patient was Richard Hillary, who wrote his highly acclaimed reminiscences of Oxford and the war, Falling Through Space and The Last Enemy, in the hospital, left to rejoin the R.A.F. and was shot down in action six weeks later. His heroics inspired Arthur Koestler's essay, The Birth of a Myth...