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Books

The Captive Mind

Czeslaw Milosz

Recommended by 2 people on the record.

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

Anne Applebaum recommends it
He is important to read because he's simultaneously critical of his characters and sympathetic to them. It's very difficult, now, to think back into that time, when people had very limited choices. If you chose to oppose the regime, that might mean you couldn't get medicine for your sick mother, your children couldn't go to school and you might get kicked out of your apartment. We don't have to face those choices. Miłosz is very good at explaining them.

on fivebooks.com · 5 Mar 2012

Timothy Snyder recommends it
Milosz tried to explain – as the title suggests – how thinking people could accept communism from inside the communist system.

on fivebooks.com · 25 Jan 2012

This book on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.