Thank you for this review. Read Darkness at Noon last year. Now I have picked up Dialogue with Death. Mr Koestler had a varied life. Would like to read more of him. Anyway again thank you for this posting. The most intelligent thing have run across on YT in months.
Koestler's 'The Act of Creation' is one of my all time favourite book, cognitive science just recently has caught up with his mind but not with the beauty of his writing! The sleepwalkers is on my reading list, what a joy it must be to read it and follow Koestler in his journey through time / space and the universe of human ideas since antiquity!
That's interesting. As well as Sleepwalkers and Act of Creation, he wrote The Ghost in the Machine as part of a loosely formed trilogy and I found that one the most impressive of the three (with lots of cognitive science in it).
@@andychristophermiller951 Will check it out to see where he went beyond 'Act of Creation' there, I think he wrote Ghost in the Machine a couple of years after 'Act of Creation'. I really enjoyed 'The Way We Think' by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. Two cognitive linguists embarking on a journey to decode the patterns of human creativity and imagination. They went well beyond Koestler's 'bisociation' with their idea of conceptual blending networks. A masterwork imo! :-)
Excellent review of a favorite book of mine, read decades ago. Thank you. You reminded me of all the reasons I loved and was imprinted by this book. His Kepler was especially touching and memorable. Now I have to read it again.
I really enjoyed The Ghost in the Machine which I also read a very long time ago. For ages afterwards I thought it was the most profound book I had ever read and I did mean to revisit it and maybe do a review on here.
@@andychristophermiller951 i’ve read it now and wasn’t disappointed. Bit of a slog in places but overall a very fascinating and rigorous book about human function and evolution etc. I’d be interested in any review that you do. Cheers.
Nice review...I also read this in 1969 , when I read most of Koestlers books. I thought it was the best read , along with "Darkness at Noon". I read somewhere that when he was researching & writing the section about Galileo he became quite sympathetic to the Catholic Church , even toying with the idea of converting.
Thanks Neil. I too enjoyed ‘Darkness’ and thought ‘The Ghost in the Machine’ was brilliant. But he began to lose me with the ‘Midwife Toad’ and the one on Coincidences and then his work just seemed to peter out.
@@andychristophermiller951 "Ghost.." was the first I read, in '68, on the advice of our biology master. It was because I was so carried away by it that I set out to read the other books , and stopped trying to be the school communist. This was Koestlers greatest achievement, I think, that he helped people like me to emerge from totalitarian tendencies, and to question "Sciencism". However, I came to see "Ghost" as a touch cranky, along with his interest you mention in 'coincidences'. At college I went to one of his lectures & tried to ask a question about "Ghost".but he couldnt hear me & replied about something else. So much for me trying to be intellectual !
I've just finished this book, good review. Certainly agree with the point of it being poetic. One of the more striking parts of it is the epilogue, which talks about the spiritual disadvantages of the rise of science, or at least the Post-Galileo form of it. Given the book he wrote, this surprised me but I thought that argument was well done and probably gave me the most to think about. Your comments would be interesting.
