A generation of outstanding European thinkers emerged out of the
rubble of World War II. It was a group unparalleled in their
probing of an age that had produced totalitarianism as a political
norm, and the Holocaust as its supreme nightmarish achievement.
Figures ranging from George Lichtheim, Ignazio Silone, Raymond
Aron, Andrei Amalrik, among many others, found a home in Encounter.
None stood taller or saw further than Francois Bondy of Zurich.In a
moving tribute to his friend, Melvin J. Lasky, long- time editor of
Encounter, writes, "Bondy was a breathtaking spectacle. I had known
him to read and walk, to think and talk, all at once--and still
make mental notes for his next article.... Early or late, seated or
standing, awake or asleep, his incomparable spiritedness would
always be darting from point to point, paying attention and idly
wandering at once. Taken all in all, he still continues to
represent for me perhaps a Henry Jamesian New Man."Bondy's essays
themselves represent a broad sweep of major figures and events in
the second half of the twentieth century. His spatial outreach went
from Budapest to Tokyo and Paris. His political essays extended
from George Kennan to Benito Mussolini. And his prime mUtier, the
cultural figures of Europe, covered Sartre, Kafka, Heidegger and
Milosz. The analysis was uniformly fair minded but unstinting in
its insights. Taken together, the variegated themes he raised in
his work as a Zurich journalist, a Paris editor, and a European
homme de letres sketch guidelines for an entrancing portrait of the
intellectual as cosmopolitan.European Notebooks contains most of
the articles that Bondy (1915-2003) wrote for Encounter under the
stewardship of Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, and then for the
thirty years that Melvin Lasky served as editor. Bondy was that
rare unattached intellectual, "free of every totalitarian
temptation" and, as Lasky notes, unfailing in his devotion to the
liberties and civilities of a humane social order. European
Notebooks offers a window into a civilization that came to maturity
during the period in which these essays were written.
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