Koester: Yesterday’s Man?
Yesterday’s Man? Anne Applebaum February 11, 2010 issue Reviewed: Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic by Michael Scammell Random House, 689 pp., $35.00 **** Extrait: As for Darkness at Noon , it was not just a popular book, it was one of the primary reasons that the Communist Party never came to power in France, a real possibility at the time. Hard though it is for us now to imagine, it was not at all obvious, in 1946 or even 1956, that Western Europe and the United States would remain solidly united for fifty years. Nor did it seem at all inevitable that the West would win the cold war. Along with Orwell’s Animal Farm and Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom , Darkness at Noon was one of the books that helped turn the tide on the intellectual front line, and ensured that the West prevailed. But unless one understands all of that, the political and literary achievements of Arthur Koestler are, to a contemp...
