Books, Arts & Manners: The First Dissident

Of Prisons and Ideas, by Milovan Djilas (Harcourt Brace, 166 pp., $17.95)

Let’s start with the main idea, for lack 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.

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Joseph Sobran

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Of Prisons and Ideas, by Milovan Djilas (Harcourt Brace, 166 pp., $17.95)

Let’s start with the main idea, for lack 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.