Books: Between Tears & Laughter

INSIGHT AND OUTLOOK (442 pp.)—Arthur Koestler—Macmillan ($5).

Budapest-born (1905) Arthur Koestler, one of the best political-novelists of the last decade (Darkness at Noon), is also a stubborn, highly independent thinker—a religious skeptic whose materialism is spiced with idealistic fervor, a radical in search of something to replace his lost faith in Communism. In The Yogi and the Commissar (TIME, June 4, 1945) Koestler tried to find a workable compromise between the pure, but passive life of the sage, and the earthy, but highly active existence of the political reformer. In his new book...