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The Captive MindBook

by Czeslaw Milosz

Who uses, recommends or left The Captive Mind, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

2 people

Anne Applebaum
American-Polish journalist and historian, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of Gulag, Iron Curtain and Autocracy, Inc.
recommended

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.

Five Books interview on memoirs of communism

2012-03-05·fivebooks.com ↗

Timothy Snyder
American historian of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust; author of Bloodlands and On Tyranny.
recommended

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

Five Books interview on books about dissent

2012-01-25·fivebooks.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.