Yesterday’s Man?
January 11th, 2010
Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic
by Michael Scammell
Random House, 689 pp., $35.00
He began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud’s. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist sympathizer, he ran into Langston Hughes. Read on »