In The Education of a 20th Century Political Animal III, Arthur Kahn recounts how after returning to New York from a nine-month sojourn in the People's Democracies of Eastern Europe he found himself adrift. Under Truman's loyalty oaths and blacklistings and McCarthyite Cold War repression, the left-wing community within which he had participated in activist struggle for more than a decade was in dissolution. Reviewing his earlier years, Arthur Kahn concluded that except for the periods in which he had a sense of direct involvement in history he felt most alive during his career as a teacher, and in this third volume of his autobiography he describes his returning to university at the age of 41 to obtain a doctorate and his subsequent rapid advance to a full professorship as chairman of a Classics Department in a new Canadian university. He recounts the vicissitudes he underwent in an abortive struggle to revivify the humanist tradition. He reports his success in enriching the lives of his students, in establishing fruitful associations with professional colleagues throughout the United States and Canada and in contributing to scholarship with the publication of articles in learned journals and in a twelve-year effort in composing a biography of Julius Caesar that would prove to be his magnum opus. He recounts, too, his Dr. Jekyll's wrestling with an obdurate Mr. Hyde.

In The Education of a 20th Century Political Animal III, Arthur Kahn recounts how after returning to New York from a nine-month sojourn in the People's Democracies of Eastern Europe he found himself adrift. Under Truman's loyalty oaths and blacklistings and McCarthyite Cold War repression, the left-wing community within which he had participated in activist struggle for more than a decade was in dissolution. Reviewing his earlier years, Arthur Kahn concluded that except for the periods in which he had a sense of direct involvement in history he felt most alive during his career as a teacher, and in this third volume of his autobiography he describes his returning to university at the age of 41 to obtain a doctorate and his subsequent rapid advance to a full professorship as chairman of a Classics Department in a new Canadian university. He recounts the vicissitudes he underwent in an abortive struggle to revivify the humanist tradition. He reports his success in enriching the lives of his students, in establishing fruitful associations with professional colleagues throughout the United States and Canada and in contributing to scholarship with the publication of articles in learned journals and in a twelve-year effort in composing a biography of Julius Caesar that would prove to be his magnum opus. He recounts, too, his Dr. Jekyll's wrestling with an obdurate Mr. Hyde.

In The Education of a 20th Century Political Animal III, Arthur Kahn recounts how after returning to New York from a nine-month sojourn in the People's Democracies of Eastern Europe he found himself adrift. Under Truman's loyalty oaths and blacklistings and McCarthyite Cold War repression, the left-wing community within which he had participated in activist struggle for more than a decade was in dissolution. Reviewing his earlier years, Arthur Kahn concluded that except for the periods in which he had a sense of direct involvement in history he felt most alive during his career as a teacher, and in this third volume of his autobiography he describes his returning to university at the age of 41 to obtain a doctorate and his subsequent rapid advance to a full professorship as chairman of a Classics Department in a new Canadian university. He recounts the vicissitudes he underwent in an abortive struggle to revivify the humanist tradition. He reports his success in enriching the lives of his students, in establishing fruitful associations with professional colleagues throughout the United States and Canada and in contributing to scholarship with the publication of articles in learned journals and in a twelve-year effort in composing a biography of Julius Caesar that would prove to be his magnum opus. He recounts, too, his Dr. Jekyll's wrestling with an obdurate Mr. Hyde.

The author of On First Looking into Homer's Odyssey reports of this work: My enthusiasm for the Homeric epics dates to 1933, when in Frank Durkee's sophomore English class in Somerville (New Jersey) High School, I was introduced to the Odyssey in the Butcher & Lang prose translation. We students had already been exposed to Classical mythology in the elementary grades, and I had read on my own Bulfinch's Age of Fable, a treasured birthday present. Mr. Durkee presented the Odyssey as a collection of fabulous adventures, and I read with excitement about the Cyclops, the witch Circe, the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis. In my late teens and early twenties I read and re-read the Iliad in various translations, eager to explore the events which preceded the Odyssey. In my mid-thirties, I undertook to master Classical Greek, impelled in great part by a desire to read Homer in the original. When I declared to Vera Lachmann, a Brooklyn College Classics professor who invited me to read Greek with her on Saturday mornings, that I was coming to believe that there was Homer and other literature, she exclaimed, "It's about time you came to that conclusion " Returning to university in 1961 to pursue courses toward a doctorate, I exposed in my dissertation Byron's critique of the Homeric epics in his comic epic, Don Juan. Appointed in 1966 to found a Classics department at Brock University, a newly established Ontario institution, I developed an intensive survey course of Classical literature in translation (from which I hoped to recruit students for courses in Latin and Greek). The first day of class of the survey course, I would announce: "People think that if they can read a newspaper they know how to read, and, indeed, you may be able to read a bestseller with minimal effort, but the works we will be studying this year require a special effort, a special kind of reading. Masterworks like the Homeric epics are to be approached as congealed life. Almost every line exposes a view of the world that Cicero denominated humanitas. And so this year you are going to learn how to read the Greek and Roman classics and to investigate an alternate view of the world to the Judaeo-Christian." The approach I have followed in the two volumes exploring Homer's dramatic artistry is similar to that I pursued in my classes more than forty years ago.

In The Education of a 20th Century Political Animal III, Arthur Kahn recounts how after returning to New York from a nine-month sojourn in the People's Democracies of Eastern Europe he found himself adrift. Under Truman's loyalty oaths and blacklistings and McCarthyite Cold War repression, the left-wing community within which he had participated in activist struggle for more than a decade was in dissolution. Reviewing his earlier years, Arthur Kahn concluded that except for the periods in which he had a sense of direct involvement in history he felt most alive during his career as a teacher, and in this third volume of his autobiography he describes his returning to university at the age of 41 to obtain a doctorate and his subsequent rapid advance to a full professorship as chairman of a Classics Department in a new Canadian university. He recounts the vicissitudes he underwent in an abortive struggle to revivify the humanist tradition. He reports his success in enriching the lives of his students, in establishing fruitful associations with professional colleagues throughout the United States and Canada and in contributing to scholarship with the publication of articles in learned journals and in a twelve-year effort in composing a biography of Julius Caesar that would prove to be his magnum opus. He recounts, too, his Dr. Jekyll's wrestling with an obdurate Mr. Hyde.

'The most complete history of how AIDS treatment activism began - and an appalling look at the government AIDS mismanagement which continues today." -John S. James, editor, "AIDS Treatment News" 'In persuasive detail.Kahn demonstrates [that] the struggle against AIDS requires a continuous fight against vested interests that have little regard for alternative ideas and against egotists who put self-aggrandizement above a worldwide crisis. Arthur Kahn's book presents the history of the clinical struggle and identifies heroes, many of whom have died fighting for all of us. Their efforts must be recognized. Their struggle is not over." -William Regelson, M.D., Professor, College of Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University (from the introduction)

In the mid 1980s Arthur Kahn worked as a volunteer at the Gay Men's Health Crisis, an organization leading the fight against AIDS epidemic. He subsequently conducted interviews in several countries regarding AL-721, a medication greeted as a possible cure for the disease. The result was "Aids, The Winter War: A Testing of America" published in 1993. His next undertaking seemed to follow naturally, interviewing some 60 New York City gay activists--gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and a transvestite, people making positive contributions in varied aspects of society. The result is "The Many Faces of Gay,"

BOOK TWO: Resisting foreign and domestic policies of the American Century champions (the Military-Industrial Complex): Communist activist; Director of Nationalities, Henry Wallace's 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign; research director, the Peace Information Center, chaired by W.E.B. Du Bois organizing the Stockholm Peace Appeal petition campaign; 1951, six-month, twenty-five state tour for the American Peace Crusade; 1952 American Labor Party congressional candidate opposing FDR, Jr.; 1954, committee in defense of court-martialed Korean War Puerto Rican soldiers; 1955, invitation to prepare book on Arbenz government's democratic reforms, blocked by the CIA's overthrow of the Guatemalan regime; publication of False Witness, Harvey Matusow's expos of Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade; 1959, subpoenaed by HUAC seeking to justify the State Department's denial of passports to left-wing Americans. BOOK THREE: Testing the validity of his dedication to Marxism: Nine months as guest of East European People's Democracies conducting interviews with Stalinists and anti-Stalinists: prime ministers, Communist functionaries, leaders of trade unions, of decimated Jewish communities, of women's and youth organizations; individual academicians, writers, journalists, and ordinary citizens.

An account of the childhood and youth during the 1920s and the Great Depression of a psychologically troubled son of impoverished shopkeepers and graduate of a backwater teachers college who survived the emotional stress of a dysfunctional family and overcame obstacles of anti-Semitism to win acceptance at the age of 23 into the elite Army intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, and advanced from post to post of military service in France and Germany to become after VE Day the editor of the leading intelligence publication in the American zone of Germany

With the near disappearance of the study of the Classics, students of literature as well as general readers lack the background to share the pleasure of Byron's contemporaries, steeped like him in the Classical literatures, in the constant interplay in his prose and poetry with the literatures of Greece and Rome. Byron underwent an intense drilling in Latin and Greek and in works of literature in both languages. Throughout his life he continued to study the Classical authors. In this book the author demonstrates how Byron repeatedly looked to Classical authors as models for his own compositions, conning as a twenty-year-old Quintilian's Institutes in preparing his frame-breakers oration in the House of Lords, studying the plays of Seneca while composing his dramatic works, turning to Theocritus and Virgil as models in pastoral poetry\ and to Horace and Juvenal for verse satire; and, finally, setting Homer and Virgil as foils for his mock epic masterpiece, Don Juan. The author reveals a level of artistry in Byron's works rarely explored and appreciated. In this book the author seeks to demonstrate an entire level of artistry in Byron's poetry and prose rarely recognized by students and readers in the twenty-first century.

"Brownstone," a proletarian, slice-of-life novel set during the McCarthy Era was described by a Negro journalist in a dispatch for circulation among Negro newspapers as "a novel for readers weary of sensationalism, brutality and despair. The story discloses the drama in the lives of ordinary people thrown together in a brownstone-front rooming house on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It is held together by Martha, the Negro housekeeper....portrayed with dignity and rare understanding....Her warmth and wisdom are decisive in several difficult situations faced by the other characters. Miguel, a garment worker and the first sympathetic Puerto Rican character ever portrayed in a novel by a white author, confronts a crisis with a hostile employer. The other characters, all white, including a clerical worker, who at 37, must decide whether to sell herself into a loveless marriage; a recent divorcee, who at 50 tries to rebuild her life; a young man who dodges the draft. With an accumulation of intensely moving detail, the author examines the loneliness in which people are driven in the large cities of America and shows that it is this isolation that impels them to unnatural choices and actions."

During a six-month coast-to-coast tour of twenty-five states to mobilize attendance at a peace conference scheduled for Chicago on June 1, 1951, Arthur Kahn kept a diary, which he subsequently published under the title Speak Out America Wants Peace. Since his sponsoring organization the American Peace Crusade could not afford to pay his expenses, he made his way by selling copies of his recently published book Betrayal: The American Occupation of Germany, a summary of his experiences as a wartime Office of Strategic Services operative and after VE Day as an peripatetic intelligence investigator and then as Chief Editor of Intelligence for the Information Control Division of Military Government. The first part of Speak Out describes a peace pilgrimage to Washington by some 2,500 people from all over the United States, seeking a negotiated end to the Korean War and actions to alleviate economic hardships in the country. In the remainder of his trip he spoke with Americans of every walk of life-trade unionists, businessmen, clergymen, farmers, intellectuals, teachers and students-people of all ages and of all races and political opinions. To his own surprise he discovered widespread unease among people about the Korean War as well as about the atmosphere of McCarthy-ite repression stifling expression of popular discontent.

In the fall of 1960, during a three-month visit to Hungary, Arthur Kahn unsuccessfully asked his hosts to arrange a meeting with Gyorgy Lukacs, a persona non grata to the Communist regime. Kahn arranged to meet Lukacs on his own and proposed translating some Lukacs essays never before appearing in English. During the three years Kahn worked on the translations, he and Lukacs engaged in a voluminous correspondence, investigating Marxism as it applied to contemporary events like the Vietnam war. Extracts from this correspondence will be included in a forthcoming volume of Kahns' autobiography, "The Education of a 20th Century Political Animal."

"I enjoy Homer in his own language. I thank on my knees, him who directed my early education, for having put into my possession this rich source of delight, and I would not exchange it for anything which I could then have acquired, and have not since acquired." -Thomas Jefferson It is an extraordinary phenomenon of Western literary history that European literature originates with two epics that continue to excite admiration after nearly three millennia. Those who must content themselves with reading the epics in translation, of course, cannot hope to share fully the unfailing delight experienced by such a fluent master of ancient Greek as Thomas Jefferson and may be tempted to dismiss as hyperbolic his pronouncement: "Homer the first of poets, as he must ever remain." Like the plays of Shakespeare and other monuments of Western literature, Homer's Iliad is a work of inexhaustible richness and complexity in which every verse impels the action, deepens the characterizations and contributes to the psychological opulence within a tapestry of recurring images and themes in a masterly interweaving of past, present and future within a skillfully evolved architecture. In the last centuries poets in every generation have sought to recapture the wonderment of the epics by producing new translations. In On First Looking into Homer's Iliad, the author of the highly praised The Education of Julius Caesar invites readers to explore book by book and often line by line the complex artistry of the epic portrayal of men at war. He is confident that after such an investigation readers will be receptive to Jefferson's enthusiastic judgment.

As a participant in many of the events he writes about in Experiment in Occupation, Arthur Kahn offers a richly detailed account of the process by which the fight against Nazism came to be transformed into the Cold War. His story reveals how those in the Military Government of Germany who were dedicated to carrying out the war aims promulgated by Roosevelt and Eisenhower for a thorough democratization of Germany were ultimately defeated in their confrontation with powerful elements in the Military Government and in Washington who were more intent upon launching a preemptive war against the Soviet Union than upon the eradication of Nazism and German militarism.

A twenty-three-year-old OSS operative, Arthur Kahn was assigned after D-Day to a psychological warfare unit, where at first he supervised prisoner-of-war interrogations and then served as an editor of intelligence. Instructed to respond to requests from Supreme Headquarters, he drafted proposals for psychological warfare approaches to critical situations at the front only to discover that a SHAEF directive banned calls to the Germans to revolt.

Subsequently Kahn served in liaison with the Soviets and during the Battle of the Bulge at Montgomery's British headquarters. For several months before and after VE Day he traveled through the American Zone as an intelligence investigator and wrote a report that led to the dismissal of General George S. Patton as Military Governor of Bavaria. Appointed Chief Editor of Intelligence of the Information Control Division, he produced the most influential intelligence weekly in the American Zone. Kahn's portrayal of events in postwar Germany provides warnings for current and future American experiments in foreign occupation.