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Summary: A gram of soma a day...
Review: Soma, feelies, scent organs...these are some of the wondrous inventions which litter the landscape of Huxley's ultra-happy dystopia. From the opening scene where we watch babies being farmed instead of born this book creates a world where science and logic have wiped out individual inspiration and such petty things as love, poetry and Shakespeare. This novel is a terrific read for it's ability to create a horrible world, and yet make it seem not so bad. This is the real power of the book. While the world of 1984 is obviously a nightmare, the world of Brave New World does not seem that bad for the most part. It draws you in and makes you wonder what a movie would be like where you can feel what the actors are feeling, or what work would be like if it was always perfectly challenging and stimulating. It creates a world that you know you are not supposed to like, but which is seductive none-the-less. And this sets up the final scene in which three men argue the fate of all our lives. In which art makes a stand against easy happiness, in which love makes a stand against ignorant bliss. The last twenty pages are a tour-de-force of philosophical inquiries which makes you realize that even though you could be happy in Huxley's Brave New World, you would never be yourself. And that is the only true happiness there is.
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Summary: Still Relevant
Review: It's useful to keep in mind that Brave New World was first published in 1932. This is not the most subtle novel that you'll have read, nor the most lyrical, but in my opinion much of what makes this novel a classic is it's originality. Orwell's 1984, to which Brave New World is often compared, was more than fifteen years from being published,. This was before Ray Bradbury, Phillip Dick, or Isaac Asimov. Some of these comparisons are more relevant than others, but the point is that the genre of futurism and science fiction had not yet been born.Brave New World can be read as a critique of the direction in which our civilization is headed, but on another level it can be interpreted as a critique of where we already are. During the tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, the scene which opens the book, the Director Mr. Foster states that the secret of happiness and virtue is "liking what you've got to do...making people like their un-escapable social destiny." Those of us who through luck of birth have grown up in Western free market economies have embraced the concept of creating our own destinies, but for the vast majority of the inhabitants of our planet life's reality is much different. The concept of an "un-escapable social destiny" is not a futuristic nightmare, but a reality of the present; workers don't have their growth stunted through alcohol in their decanting fluid, but through malnutrition and disease. Perhaps Huxley's clearest statement is in favor of being awake and aware of society's ills, rather than blinding ourselves. In Huxley's brave new world, individuals achieve Foster's goal of embracing their destiny largely by staying busy, avoiding any reflection, denying their mortality, and drowning themselves in the drug soma whenever a problem arises. Brave New World carries a heavy anti-drug message, which is ironic in that Huxley would later become heavily involved in the psychedelic drug culture and would be considered one of the godfathers of the hippie movement . Huxley is a bit heavy handed in suggesting that society much pick one of two extremes (either the madness of the savage or the sterile soul-less utopia of the controllers) but in the end he uses this device to show us that there are choices to be made. An interesting observation, and one that is rarely noted, is that in the closing debate between the World Controller Mustapha Mond and the Savage, it's Mond's argument Huxley makes more convincing - or at least that is articulated more clearly. In the end the reader accepts neither, in that both represent an unacceptable extreme, but Huxley makes the point that the emotions of passion, ambition, love, and glory come with the costs of jealousy, violence, and suffering. This is a clever novel, and at times unexpectedly funny, but in my opinion I'm not sure that Brave New World ranks as great literature. In the areas of character development, dialogue, and structure it's in many ways forgettable. What makes the novel interesting is its timelessness. We now face new threats, from terrorism to nuclear war, but the novel's core message is a relevant today as it was in 1932.
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Summary: Scifi? Drama? Political Satire?-whatever, it's great!
Review: Aldous Huxley has concocted the most abstract, encompassing, and somewhat frightening novel about a possible and plausible future destination the world could arrive at if it decided to follow a certain course of action. In Huxley's novel, the events that are depicted here can be determined to take place about six hundred years from now. Extreme scientific progression in the field of genetic engineering and biochemistry coupled with an apparent social retrogression into a rigid, inflexible caste system have transformed the people of the earth into a totally bizarre society which contrasts radically to today's lifestyle. One of the novel's characters, John the Savage, finds out he's analogous to a square peg in a round hole once he is removed from his indian reservation environment and transplanted into the "brave new world" of the futuristic London. John's plight illustrates the inevitable obfuscation anyone can experience if obtrusively placed in surroundings of omnipresent unfamiliarity. In consideration of the year 1932 when this novel was published, the facts that the principles of heredity were discovered by a cloistered Austrian monk a relatively few years before, and that nucleic acids would not be determined to contain the genetic "blueprints" of organisms until many years later; it's easy to see Mr. Huxley was a very erudite, perspicacious, and artful writer well ahead of his time. I am still waiting to see if a feature motion picture based on this novel will ever be produced. A little bit of trivia here: Mr. Huxley's death on November 22, 1963 went relatively unnoticed by the general public only because someone else of more prominence was assassinated that same day.
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Summary: At what price contentment?
Review: Brave New World is an excellent book and, what's more, one that seems to be becoming more relevant all the time in our fast paced world. And unlike many other books with a similar philosophical orientation, Brave New World is quite refreshing, as Huxley's prose is somehow manages to be clear, elegant and insightful without being overly obvious. As regards the actual plot, Brave New World is in essence a portrayal of a utopia (or dystopia, depending how you look at it) in which there is constant prosperity, people are always content, as they are well provided for and have been programmed to like their society in all respects. This programming is undertaken by workers in charge of breeding the future citizens of this idyllic world, which is united under one government, under Ford. As everybody has been programmed to like their class and job, everybody is constantly content and has no wish to do anything other than what is required of them. If they happen to become depressed, of course, there is always the mood altering drug Soma. Through presenting a few individuals who do not exactly fit into this molded world, however, Huxley presents us with a challenging and endlessly interesting question: What can possibly be wrong with a world in which everybody is happy, even if there is no real free will involved in actuality? If we can make ourselves superficially content and never have to suffer a moment of desperation or uncertainty, why not just do that? With the help of William Shakespeare and a young man from a "savage reservation," Huxley explores the alternatives to his invented society's promotion of mindless satisfaction. Should true art and the deep thought and emotion that inspires it be sacrificed to perpetual happiness without thought or deeper feeling? Or is the attempt to find these deeper meanings just silly and self-defeating, as we will all meet the same fate in the end? In this era of quick entertainment, instant gratification and materialism unbounded, there are no better questions to be asking than these, the ones at the heart of Brave New World. Pick up a copy and start to read - in addition to being quite interesting as a science-fiction book or portrayal of a future world, Brave New World is a book that inspires a lot of thinking about our lives today.
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Summary: An in depth look at the future of society
Review: Good book! I could not get enough of it! I normally do not like science fiction type novels, but I really enjoyed this one. It was so different from society back when Huxley wrote Brave New World, and still different now. In a good way. This is one of the few futuristic novels I've read that didn't mention a year, and therefore, I believe that this book will always be futursitic. It is truly fascinating to see what Aldous Huxley's creation and view of what society could come to if it weren't for science, religion, and distinct social classes. I must admit that the ending was not as much of a treasure as the rest of the book, but still a good book all in all. Read it!
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Summary: One of the top three
Review: This is one of the top three books on my list that we've recently read in school. The other two were "Of Mice and Men," by Steinbeck, and Jackson McCrae's "The Bark of the Dogwood." All three were excellent, but Huxley's "Brave New World" just blew me away. My only dislike of the book was the overuse of the "Oh, Ford," idea as a joke. It wore thin after the first seven hundred times. Other than that, the book was great food for thought. Imagine how ahead of its time it must have been all those years ago!
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Summary: a true representation of humanity's flaw
Review: A Brave New World gives the reader a new perspective on humanity. What I think is a concurrent theme in this book is one of knowledge and stability. It seems that although freedom is much more desireable to people, it is also unstable and allows for no basic law to encompass all boudries within society. People in this book dont' want to think for themselves, they want to be told what to do, because they can never be sure what they do is what they should do. I like this book because of its challenging ideas.
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Summary: A Book for You
Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a story about a futuristic society where people's every move is ultimately controlled through brainwashing as infants and children. People are grown in tubes and conditioned to live life a certain way and by a strict hierarchy. This hierarchy is made up of five classes, the highest being Alpha, followed by Betas, Deltas, Gammas, and finally Epsilons. This conditioning makes people live the "happiest" they can by using the least amount of reason possible, other than to perform the necessary tasks involved with sustaining the world, but when any sort of mood penetrates this veneer of euphoria, the drug soma is available to wash away the uneasiness. However, there are people who are not able to conform into the neat little automatons that the society wants everyone to be-these radicals make up the main characters. Bernard Marx, mocked and ridiculed for his small stature because everyone who is an Alpha is grown to be big, strong, and good looking, is the first of the main characters we meet. Because of his being an outcast, Bernard starts to think differently than the people around him, something looked down upon by the standards of the "brave new world." The next main character that is introduced to the reader is Bernard's best friend Helmholtz Watson, the physical antithesis of Bernard, and everything their society wants in someone, except he wants to be a writer, and write about his feelings and emotions, things people are not allowed to express, or even feel. This makes Helmholtz ultimately unhappy, because he can't find a way to express himself through the writing content allowed by the society. Finally, there is John, "The Savage," who Bernard finds on a reservation for Indians in New Mexico. John is the son of a Beta woman who was lost and forgotten about on the reservation years ago. Now, child birth is something that disgusts most "civilized" people in this future world, as most are grown, and not birthed. So, a person born to a civilized woman is of great interest and John is allowed to go back to London with Bernard to become immersed in the "brave new world." John quickly becomes disgusted with this civilized world, and rebels by taking soma rations away from a group of Gamma workers and throwing them out of a window, demanding they strive for liberty, rather than servitude. The Gamma workers become appalled by John's actions and begin to fight him for the rations. Helmholtz dives into the fray to help John, and along with Bernard, they are arrested. All three are brought before the resident Controller, the person who basically controls the life of the citizens, Mustapha Mond. A discussion erupts between the prisoners and the controller. Huxley uses the individually intelligent dialogue that these rebels have as compared to the other citizens in the novel to show the extremes on both sides of the argument. They discuss art, and why it cannot exist, religion, and how it has changed, and philosophy, and why it is only true to the individual, something the new world has tried to eradicate. In the end neither side persuades the reader because the arguments on both sides are too extreme.
I found a lot to connect with this novel about, as it shines light onto today's faults by showing the opposite, the world's foil. We accept our upbringing and continue with it through our children because that's the way we've been taught; why shouldn't they be? Present day art, poetry, and literature are all ultimately controlled, not to the extent as in Brave New World, but that is the point of the book: to show us what we look like in the extreme. The character I felt I could most relate to was John. He is someone who can somehow see the world through a different set of eyes than others do. His choices were "insanity or lunacy," wrote Huxley in the Foreword. This seems to be the only choice the world gives a lot of people. We can either work a job we hate or live on the street.
I really loved the book, and thought it was a great example of the effect society has on an individual. So much emphasis is put on preserving the social order we forget what it is like to have the right to be truly free. Though, the book poses interesting questions like, we strive to live without society, but is it really possible? And, do we all want order on some level? This book provides many questions, but none of the answers, which to me makes the book great because it allows the reader to think independently, and not be influenced by the writer. Brave New World lets a person really question his or her place in life without being antagonistic, making it easier to understand Huxley's point of view.
My recommendation would be to read the book as many times as you would like, because it may offer insight you may not have seen the first, or second time you read it. Anyone who enjoys questioning life, and questioning society, should read this novel. Brave New World should be an important part of everyone's library.
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Summary: A Thought-Provoking Book
Review: I'm not particularly interested in the question of this book's place as a work of literary genius. It may be an indispensable part of the Western canon. It may be predictable and its characters flat. I think both arguments can be made convincingly. Both positions miss the point of the book, though. Huxley wasn't unskilled as an author, but he never wrote expressly to produce a great piece of literature. His writing was purposeful and prophetic, intended to communicate a warning. Huxley would likely prefer a reader who denigrates his literary skill while grasping his point than one who blindly lauds him. What, then, is the point? Huxley paints a portrait of a not too distant world where the life has gained in comfort but lost all of its flavor. There remains no passion, no true excitement (only its physiological equivalent), no opportunities for sacrifice and love. All of these have been sacrificed on the altar of stability and contentment. All goes well until a few outsiders (Bernard, Helholtz, and John)who don't quite fit the mold of this society are introduced. The tension gradually builds to the climactic confrontation between John's worldview as an outsider and the ideology of the World State. Huxley leaves this final debate open, requiring that we examine our own assumptions. The clear implication of Brave New World is that our society contains the seeds of a future world like the one Huxley describes. The dangerous trends that he identified in the 1920s continue to dominate the societies of the world's industrialized nations: overconsumption, hypersexuality, self-medication, the pursuit of ever greater creature comforts, the decline of ethics and of poetry, the promotion of leisure for its own sake, and the possibility of genetic engineering controlled by a narrow elite. The greatest testament to Aldous Huxley would be if we each left his book determined to reevaluate our culture's often dangerous values. Brave New World demands a change in the way we think of ourselves and in the way we live our lives. Anything short of that response shows our failure to get the point.
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Summary: Brave New World
Review: "Begin at the beginning..." Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, was published in 1932. Brave New World the genre of this book is futuristic and well a lot of science! I really mean it! The beginning of the book starts in the so-called "Hatchery". With that Mr. Foster explains all about the "Hatchery" and what it does, and how they raise the embryos. He tells the students what are the roles of these so-called "humans", for when they grow up they will be only living for one and only one purpose... The types of these "humans" are Alpha, Beta, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. Alpha people wear gray, they're most likely the smartest out of all the types, and they also work very hard too! Unlike Beta because they dislike working and are the medium class, well for education... Gammas you can say are just like us! Ordinary, well yet the only thing is they're kind of like Leprechauns because they always wear green! I don't really know anything about the Deltas... Last one is the Epsilons! They are the stupidest of the five types (It's kind of funny). Well I think the message is like that you should always stick to your goal! Never let anything come between you and your destiny. As you see the "humans" keep themselves always busy! They have no time for the social crisis of normal life like, they don't care for alcohol, drugs, family, friends, anything! Myself, I think anyone that can read this novel really should! This novel is like the best thing in the world it teaches love, aspiration, and honor comes with high costs. I really recommend this book to anyone! Myself... a four out of a five.
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