Arrow in the Blue - Hardcover

Koestler, Arthur

4.33

222 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0025650203 ISBN 13: 9780025650206

Publisher: Macmillan Pub Co, 1970

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Two of Koestler's quotes: (1) Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion (2) Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears. This book is an autobiography (Vol 1 of 4) of Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), Hungarian-British author, novelist, essayist, and journalist. He was a well-known intellectual and a prolific writer of fiction, non-fiction, history, autobiography, memoirs, politics, philosophy, psychology, parapsychology, and science.In 1940 he published his novel Darkness at Noon, an anti-totalitarian work that gained him international fame.In 1968 he was awarded the Sonning Prize "for his outstanding contribution to European culture" and in 1972 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In this book he recalls the most important commitment of his youth: his conversion to communist in 1931 in blind and hopeless pre-Hilter Germany. By the age of 25 he had reached the top of his journalistic profession, a restless, sharp-eyed wanderer who travelled through Europe and the Middle East living--and making--history as a pioneer in early Palestine, a firsthand witness to the fall of the German Republic and the rise of nazism. In his vivid, exciting youth, he was, among other things, a member of a dwelling fraternity at the University of Vienna, a Zionist immigrant to Palestine, a lemonade vendor on the streets of Haifa, a bohemian in Tel Aviv, the editor of a weekly in Cairo, foreign correspondent for the biggest chain of Continental newspapers in Paris and the Middle East, science editor in Berlin, and the only journalist on board the Graf Zepelin during its historic North Pole expedition of 1931. An amazing story of history as Koestler lived it.

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About the Author:

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905. He attended the university of Vienna before working as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Berlin and Paris. For six years he was an active member of the Communist Party, and was captured by Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 he came to England. He wrote The Gladiators in Hungarian, Darkness at Noon in German, and Arrival and Departure in English. He set up the Arthur Koestler Award (now the Koestler Trust) which awards prizes for creative achievements to prisoners, detainees and patients in special hospitals. He died in 1983 by suicide, having frequently expressed a belief in the right to euthanasia.

Review:

"A brilliant and deeply moving record of a whole generation as well as of an individual" * The Observer * "The cumulative effect is overwhelming" * New Republic * "He is a journalist of ideas on a very high level - the kind we lack and need in this country - who functions midway between the realms of art and of society, but whose function is indispensable, if thought is to be part of culture" * Saturday Review *

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