[In "The Captive Mind" Milosz's] theme is the state of mind that causes intellectuals to submit to and even welcome Communism and, once they have done so, the desperate shifts and twists and turns they use to adapt themselves to an ideology that makes it almost impossible for them to continue to create…. He is writing about just that group of intellectuals one would think the Communists would have the greatest trouble controlling—those in the East European satellite nations. Their counterparts in the Western world can still have illusions because they don't have to live with the reality….

"The Captive Mind" is written with wit and eloquence and … is both original and penetrating…. [However, it] is not a personal narrative, full of growing doubts, heroic defiances, and ultimate redemption. It is not an exposé, for the author is so lacking in journalistic savvy that he uses pseudonyms for the eminent Polish literary converts to Communism whose case histories he gives. Nor is it one of those emphatic, encyclopedic, and neatly organized works that clearly and decisively settle the question once and for all. Milosz's book represents, instead, an unfamiliar and rather antiquated form—the speculative essay. It is too bad the form is not more popular, since it is admirably suited, because of the scope it allows for the tentative, the complicated, and the contradictory, to precisely the use it is here put to, which is analyzing the ambiguity of the intellectual's reaction to Communism in power…. Except for Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism,"… I know of no study of the totalitarian mentality as subtle and imaginative as this one. (p. 173)