New Releases by Arthur Koestler

Reflections on Hanging is a searing indictment of capital punishment, inspired by its author’s own time in the shadow of a firing squad. During the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler was held by the Franco regime as a political prisoner, and condemned to death. He was freed, but only after months of witnessing the fates of less-fortunate inmates. That experience informs every page of the book, which was first published in England in 1956, and followed in 1957 by this American edition. As Koestler ranges across the history of capital punishment in Britain (with a focus on hanging), he looks at notable cases and rulings, and portrays politicians, judges, lawyers, scholars, clergymen, doctors, police, jailers, prisoners, and others involved in the long debate over the justness and effectiveness of the death penalty. In Britain, Reflections on Hanging was part of a concerted, ultimately successful effort to abolish the death penalty. At that time, in the forty-eight United States, capital punishment was sanctioned in forty-two of them, with hanging still practiced in five. This edition includes a preface and afterword written especially for the 1957 American edition. The preface makes the book relevant to readers in the U.S.; the afterword overviews the modern-day history of abolitionist legislation in the British Parliament. Reflections on Hanging is relentless, biting, and unsparing in its details of botched and unjust executions. It is a classic work of advocacy for some of society’s most defenseless members, a critique of capital punishment that is still widely cited, and an enduring work that presaged such contemporary problems as the sensationalism of crime, the wrongful condemnation of the innocent and mentally ill, the callousness of penal systems, and the use of fear to control a citizenry.

Arthur Koestler''s extraordinary history of humanity''s changing vision of the universe In this masterly synthesis, Arthur Koestler cuts through the sterile distinction between ''sciences'' and ''humanities'' to bring to life the whole history of cosmology from the Babylonians to Newton. He shows how the tragic split between science and religion arose and how, in particular, the modern world-view replaced the medieval world-view in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. He also provides vivid and judicious pen-portraits of a string of great scientists and makes clear the role that political bias and unconscious prejudice played in their creativity.

Arthur Koestler''s publications manifest a wide range of political, scientific and literary interests. The Trail of the Dinosaur gathers some of his best-known essays and speeches. The Trail of the Dinosaur , first published in 1955, contains a great deal of Koestler''s thinking for the first ten years after the war – a ''farewell to arms'' as he wrote in his preface. These essays deal with the political questions that obsessed him for the best part of a quarter of a century. The essays in ''The Trail of the Dinosaur'' cover the decade 1946–55-the early or classical period of the Cold War. In that confrontation the West was on the defensive, and the majority of its progressive intellectuals were still turning a benevolently blind eye on Soviet foreign policy and the facts of life behind the Iron Curtain . In the dramatic contest between Whitaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, which has been called the Dreyfus Affair of our century, progressive opinion stood firmly behind Hiss. And when, in the New York Times, I took Chambers'' part, I became, if possible, even more unpopular among self-styled progressives than I had been before. In 1937, during the Civil War in Spain, I spent three months under sentence of death as a suspected spy, witnessing the executions of my fellow prisoners and awaiting my own. These three months left me with a vested interest in capital punishment-rather like ''half-hanged Smith'', who was cut down after fifteen minutes and lived on.

In this novel the call-girls are the men and women of the international jet-set who, at the lift of a telephone, will fly from conference to congress to symposium to discuss subjects of world importance. This time the place is Switzerland and the subject Survival...

"In 1937, while working for the London News Chronicle as a correspondent with the loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, I was captured by General Franco''s troops and held for several months in solitary confinement, witnessing the executions of my fellow-prisoners and awaiting my own. [This book] is an account of that experience written immediately after my release, in July-August, 1937 ... My principal interest in writing [this book] was an introspective one : the psychological impact of the condemned cell. From this view point, the political background was irrelevant, and the narrative, as far as it went, was the truthful account of an intimate experience"--Page xiii-xiv.

Il ne faut pas se méprendre sur le titre de ce roman : les Call-girls de Koestler sont tout à fait fréquentables. Par cette métaphore, Koestler désigne les sommités universitaires et autres éminents spécialistes qui, toute l''année durant, parcourent le monde de séminaires en congrès. Dans le décor alpestre d''une " kongresshaus ", Koestler imagine ici un séminaire sur le thème du devenir de l''humanité et plus particulièrement de la démence suicidaire de l''homme. Pendant les beaux jours d''un été qui précède une troisième guerre mondiale, douze intellectuels de renom se réunissent donc autour de ce sujet.

The third volume of Arthur Koestler''s autobiography covering the years 1940-1956.

Janus is both a summing up and continuation of Koestler''s work over the past twenty-five years, since he turned from politics to the sciences of life- or more precisely, to the ''evolution, creativity and pathology of the human mind''. The insights gained on that long journey are here assembled in a coherent and comprehensive synthesis, and in the last part of the book, he offers us a tantalizing ''glance through the key-hole'' from subatomic physics to metaphysics.

"The Khazars (Turkish: Hazarlar) were a semi-nomadic Turkic people who created one of the largest states of medieval Eurasia, Khazaria, with its capital at Atil. Astride one of the major arteries of commerce between northern Europe and southwestern Asia, Khazaria commanded the western marches of the Silk Road and played a key commercial role as a crossroad between China, the Middle East, and Europe."--Wikipedia.

The author advances the theory that all creative activities have a basic pattern in common, which he attempts to define.

"Mr. Koestler''s main concern is with demonstrating that, contrary to what one might expect- namely, that...paranormal events are most disturbing because they seem to break what most of us think are the laws of the real world- it is precisely modern physics that offers a "rapprochement" between the real world and parapsychology, even if the rapprochement is "negative in the sense that the unthinkable phenomena of ESP appear somewhat less preposterous in the light of the unthinkable propositions of physics." As Mr. Koestler so lucidly and wittily demonstrates, modern physics depicts a world of noncausational paradoxes- a wonderland of Heisenbergian Principles of Uncertainty, of mysterious elementary particles, of psi-fields, anti-electrons, multi-dimensionality, and time running forward and backward. And unlike Newton''s clockwork universe, this new world is not at all uncongenial to the dice-shooter convinced that he has a "hot" hand or the sensitive who insists that his dreams are premonitory" -- by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times, August 11, 1972.

An account of Paul Kammerer''s research on Lamarckian evolution and what he called "serial coincidences".

This selection of essays, book-reviews, broadcast talks and papers delivered to learned societies reflects the extraordinary breadth of Arthur Koestler''s interests. From the trial of Galileo to the pleasures of canoeing down the Loire, from a detailed examination of the ''memory'' of flatworms to an equally detailed examination of the futility of quarantining dogs, the author writes about a vast range of subjects which occupied his attention in the twelve years (1955-1967) covered by this collection. Those were the years that saw, among many other works, the publication of his great trilogy about the mind of man: THE SLEEPWALKERS, THE ACT OF CREATION, and THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE. It is not surprising therefore, that many of these essays elaborate certain aspects of arguments which occur in those books. They could, as the author says in his Preface, ''be called variations on certain themes'', and the selection of books reviewed also reveals a certain thematic coherence. There is, however, a great deal of miscellaneous material, quite different in nature from Koestler''s scientific preoccupations, with which he has been so closely associated in recent years. This includes the subjects of his ''crusades'', such as the campaign for the abolition of hanging, the scandal of our quarantine laws, some escapist travel essays, and some controversies in which he became engaged. Like everything Koestler writes, DRINKERS OF INFINITY not only stimulates the mind, but gives the greatest pleasure to the reader while doing so.