The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz
Published 1953 · 78,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Philosophy
How hard is The Captive Mind to read?
The Captive Mind scores 66 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Political, philosophical.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Miłosz's essayistic prose.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Ideology, intellectuals.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Communist Poland.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Essay portraits.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- Ketman, pills.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Ironic analysis.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Analysis complete.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Essay structure.
How The Captive Mind is regarded
The Captive Mind holds a literary regard score of 73 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.