Paradise Regained: Memoir of a Rebel

At 77, Milovan Djilas is Yugoslavia's ``most famous dissident.'' Formerly one of Tito's top lieutenants, Djilas fell from grace in 1954 by positing, in a series of articles, that the Communists had achieved their revolutionary goals and had subsequently created their own elite of privileged officials. Djilas expanded his thesis in The New Class (1957), a manuscript of which he smuggled West prior to a three-year prison term. A second critical work published in the West in 1962, Conversations with Stalin , led to five more years' imprisonment. While jailed, Djilas translated Milton's Paradise Lost into Serbo-Croatian; in addition, he has written numerous other works and what Sulzberger claims are ``brilliant'' short stories. Sulzberger, a New York Times correspondent who first met Djilas in 1945, has obscured his interesting subject in a repetitive and rambling biography. Dense quotes from conversations and from Djilas's writings bog down rather than enhance the story; the result reads more like a term paper than the personal tribute Sulzberger intended. (Mar.)