Private Antal is a "novel on my life" by Anthony Halasz, a Hungarian born architect city planner, painter, printmaker, furniture and occasional costume designer, a survivor of what he calls "the fury of futureless utopias" that killed his extended family and turned him into an emigrant whose wonderings ended in America where in the waning days of the Korean War he was drafted into the US Army. Private Antal was written by this self declared "remnant of the Enlightenment" who late in his life bundled his recollections around his time in the US Army where circumstances allowed in him 1956 to bring his mother and brother out from a Hungary on fire. His Private Antal is a "novel" of elegant metaphors and associations, one that is rich in architectural insights for the non initiated. It is a book of love of family and profession that he effortlessly mixes with the unforeseeable joys and the unavoidable heartbreaks of human existence.