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The Captive Mind cover art

The Captive Mind

Written by: Czeslaw Milosz, Jane Zielonko - translator, Claire Bloom - director
Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
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Publisher's Summary

The best-known prose work by the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature examines the moral and intellectual conflicts faced by men and women living under totalitarianism of the left or right.

Written in the early 1950s, when Eastern Europe was in the grip of Stalinism and many Western intellectuals placed their hopes in the new order of the East, this classic work reveals in fascinating detail the often beguiling allure of totalitarian rule to people of all political beliefs and its frightening effects on the minds of those who embrace it.

©2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

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Great

A chilling treatise about post-WW2 communist Poland presented through a series of short essays, many of which discuss the careers of certain Polish writers.

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Should be required reading in schools everywhere.

Too much has been lost to apathy and ignorance which has allowed the ugly face of the tactics used by communism. The philosophical perspective of a survivor.

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Fantastic insight to 1950s.

I grew up in one of the Baltic States after t fall of SSSR. This means I am very familiar to what happened there, also in Poland, other countries absorbed by the “empire” but only from a standpoint of it no longer being a current threat, reality. I found it fantastic to read what was going on in a man’s head at the time no end to it was visible, written before the death of Stalin, before Cuba crisis, before “Brezhnev for the eternity”. The point of view in most familiar is coming from those people who witnessed the perestroika, who felt the change their entire life, it comes from people with hope and future. It was very strange to suddenly be transported to the time it wasn’t yet apparent and realising that even though there was a good ending, the people didn’t change. The choice didn’t change. You are left, or right, or wrong in so many countries in the west and east, where dialectics of the political debate are absolute, and people are split into camps of absolute believers.
It’s a fantastic listen. The reader is great, the mind flow of the author is very accessible in the audio form. Highly recommend to... everyone. It’s a great short introduction to the atrocities of post WW2 in the shoes of the Baltic Sea, to the human mind trapped between two fires and a great parallel to the current shattered world of opinions.

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