The Captive Mind

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania. He worked with the Polish resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and was later stationed in Paris and Washington, DC, as a cultural attaché of the Polish People’s Republic. Milosz defected to France in 1951, and in 1960 he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his many prizes and honors are the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Berkeley Citation, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Claire Bloom, CBE, is an English film and stage actress, known for leading roles in plays such as Streetcar Named Desire, A Doll’s House, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, along with nearly sixty films and countless television roles, during a career spanning over six decades. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2013 Queen’s birthday honors for services to drama.

Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than five thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than nine hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices in 2012.