Kirkus Reviews QR Code
ARTHUR KOESTLER by John Atkins

ARTHUR KOESTLER

By

Publisher: Roy

The gnawing doubts, introspections, and contrarieties of Arthur Koestler have come to represent the political plight of the Western intellectual. Koestler has offered no solutions to the dilemmas of our time, realignments and reversals in his beliefs have all been hedging and tentative, the psychological- economic- historical evaluations he makes are on the whole amateurish. Yet the very existence of his thinking (excluding for the moment his considerable gifts as a novelist) has earned him as wide and substantial a reputation as is ordinarily earned only by the merit and validity of what a man says. The present full-length study is therefore well-received, and Mr. Atkins has had the good sense to approach Koestler's significance as an example or personification of today's political crisis. Serious, textual, Atkins has preserved the qualities in Koestler that have a symptomatic worth and the result is rewarding and occasionally illuminating.