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Article: Of prisons and ideas.
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- April 10, 1987
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1987 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Of Prisons and Ideas
by Milovan Djilas(Harcourt Brace, 166 pp., $17.95)
LET'S START with the main idea, forlack of anything better. Milovan Djilas believes that man needs a main idea above all things, and that, I guess, is the main idea of Of Prisons and Ideas. Djilas has been in prison three times, and it was because of his devotion to his idea--of freedom--that he was able to withstand isolation and torture, plenty of it. He doesn't believe in absolute freedom, but he says he came closest to the sensation of it in prison, when the torturers couldn't break him.
He is best known, of course, as theoriginal dissident, the first man to openly defy ...