Captive Mind

Milosz Czeslaw (b. 1911), Polish-American author, translator, and critic who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Czeslaw Milosz worked with the Polish Resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and defected to France in 1951. His work brings to bear the political awareness of an exile -- most notably in A Treatise on Poetry, a forty-page exploration of the world wars that rocked the first half of the twentieth century.

• The pill of the Murti-Bing; looking to the West; Ketman; Alpha, the moralist; Beta, the disappointed lover; Gamma, the slave of history; Delta, the troubadour; man, his enemy; the lessons of the Baltics.