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Fahrenheit 451 CD

Fahrenheit 451 CD

List Price: $29.95
Your Price: $18.87
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A book that sparks a new flame
Review: This book is remarkable. Fahrenheit 451 by Rad Bradbury is an intriguing book about what would happen if a society had gotten rid of books. I totally have grown to like this book. I have read it 3 times over and every time I Loved the way Rad Bradbury wrote as if the book was a debate of literay authors and ideas. The reader can visualize the pain and risk Guy Montag the main character goes through. The first thing I noticed about this book is the cover. How clever to have a person burning with newspaper and the title "Fahrenheit 451" which is the point where things burn. The best part of this unique book to me is the last part "Burning Bright" and the afterword. Bradbury's writing stands out the best. The reader can totally feel the fatigue as Guy takes his last step, before realizing he is safe.This book sparked a new "flame" for me because I could feel and taste the burning of books and how it could impact my society now. I can just feel what would happend if my city,state or country burned books. The chaos and killings. Books now are looked at as last resorts. The internet has taken over all books. But this book made me think a lot too. I reread his afterword and coda twice because I like to think of how he came up with this idea and his writing style. This is a great book that not only gets the reader lost in this world of burning but notices different authors, books, and new ideas that can bring just a better new generation of authors, poets and everyday writers and thinkers to come as one and share to the world that as quoted in Fahrenheit 451,"Knowledge is Power!"

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Fahrenheit 451
Review: Fahrenheit 451 is a well written and thought out science fiction novel that has many different levels of understanding to it. The book is designed to force people to consider the future of society seriously. This book is great because it changes the roles of people in the future to make the plot interesting. The plot of the book is set at a brisk pace to keep the reader from putting it down because the author is desparately trying to prove many points that are hidden throughout the story.
The book places you into the future where the government tells the people what they can read and how they can live. The majority of the people loose their independence because they allow this to happen without protesting and they deserve what horrible thing will come of this. There are a few people like Montague who begin to fight back against the government. Montague used to be a fireman who in the government contolled society burns fictional books until there are none left in the city. The government wants all fictional books burned so everybody can be happy all the time. It turns out the people become ignorant because there are no fictional stories to compare their lives to. Montague attemps to escape the government with a few allies helping him out by storing the memories of the books in their heads to share with generations to come.
Montague at first loves his job as a book burner, but he changes as he sees how ignorant the people in society are getting. Montague's curiosity lures him to the books. Montague is independent unlike all the characters in the story who are brainwashed except for Montague's ally Faber. Faber is a frightened old man who used to be a college proffesor until the government ruled that there will be no more fictional books, and he was forced to live alone without his beloved books. Montague came along and changed Faber so that he wasn't like all the other ignorant people. Faber now will fight back for what he believes by helping Montague bring books back to life. Montague and Faber need eachother to live in this society.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: I Wanted More!!
Review: I thought about the rating of this book (for my taste personally) overnight. I really liked this book, but I felt cheated. Why isn't there more? I wished Ray Bradbury would have kept going with this book. The reason why I wanted more was because I wanted to know what else would happen with Montag when he returned to the ruined city.

Ray Bradbury ushered many feelings when I read this book. I was scared of that Hound. I was angry at Millie's friends and Millie. I was kind of impatient with Clarisse. I was confused whenever Beatty was speaking. When it came to Montag, I thought he was not only "foolish", but smart, too.

This futuristic look of the world is quite imaginative, but it could be real. Fire fighters starting fires instead of putting them out. No one able to read without losing their livelihood. Living in the fear of war and dying without knowing a real reason why. Being caught in the world of visual entertainment that entails walls as televisions, and the weirdest part, people caring more about the television "family" more so than their own flesh and blood. It is a possible future, but one man's vision is not necessarily the truth of this world.

I liked this book, but I just wished there was more.

Joy.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A book about book burning.
Review: I am not such a fan of Ray Bradbury but his book Fahrenheit 451 is excellent and is now among modern classics in the same line as 1984 and Brave New World. Most new versions of this book carry with it a great introduction from Bradbury about how he typed his manuscript on a typewriter that cost 10 cents to use every half hour. The story was first published by Playboy magazine. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which books burn.

Inspired by Hitler and Stalin book burning, 451 tells the futuristic tale of a fireman, Guy Montag, who works for the government as an emergency book burner that sets fires to books which have been banned. They storm houses, dig up floor boards, find books, destroy them and then arrest the owners.

Montag begins to question the controlling society that he lives in. Why is he burning books? Inevitably this leads him to seek out books for himself and with it the paranoia of being found out while working for such an oppressive regime. There is some very good plot twists and the story is full of tension, suspicion and mistrust.

You will read 451 in a day or two. It is less than 200 pages long and easy to get through. A modern classic that you should not miss.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: How far are we from fiction?
Review: Definetly this book is worth reading, it is interesting that even dough it was written in the 50s it represents many of today's issues, it is profetic in many ways.
Book burning is only a representation of ways to hide knoledge, this can also be done by controling newspapers and news in general, by limiting information to a society or prohibiting books.
Are we to far from fiction?, when our rights are steped on in the name of freedom something is seriously wrong, someone once said that going to war in the name of peace is like having sex in the name of virginity.
I like the ending of this book, but to be honest I really beleive the story could have been done much better, I still give it four stars because I found the main issue, that is, free thinking and access to knoledge, are very well ejemplified trough the story, and it really gives the reader something to analize, it also makes for a great round table discussion.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: 24th Century version of RIF: "Reading is Flammable"!
Review: Ray Bradbury's 1953 phantasmagoric blockbuster "Fahrenheit 451", written at the height of the fabulist's authorial powers, is a tale of a world gone mad, a topsy-turvy America in which black leather-clad firemen race laughing on their steely Salamanders on midnight alarms, not to quench fires but to start them.

The firemen of the nightmare world of "Fahrenheit 451", of which the novel's hero Guy Montag is a dedicated one, comprise an army turned against an enemy far more insidious than Flame: they mobilize against ideas, and turn their napalm hoses on the feeble paper on which those subversive ideas are printed, and on the vulnerable binding in which the paper is housed.

When I first read "Fahrenheit 451" nearly two decades ago, I felt beaten, nauseated and fatigued; I believed then, and believe now, that it was the most scarily bleak and mercilessly depressing book I had ever read. Even then, I felt the cushion between Bradbury's 24th century nightmare and what we call modern reality was thin and worn.

Bradbury gave us until the 24th century to submerge ourselves in the dark, sedated, media-slaked night of "Fahrenheit 451." Looking around me, I have come to the conclusion that Bradbury was a pretty optimstic guy.

Like Orwell's "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" is a dystopian vision, a glimpse into a future America that is frighteningly familiar and yet horribly wrong. It is a technologically advanced, subtle, sophisticated world, full of high-definition television screens that take up an entire wall and beam 24 hour programming to a vacant and eager television audience, 24-hour Reality programming that serves up a TV "Family" more engaging, more lifelike, more agreeable, than their own.

This is a world where bored, vacuous housewives exchange barbs on the latest presidential contenders laced with observations on which candidate is the most handsome, and which has the most noticeable (to the Television Audience, naturally) facial bunion or boil. It is a world of 'seashells', tiny earphones designed to nest in the inner ear and breathe a sussurus of music into the mind of a medicated listener. Like his English counterparts Huxley and Orwell, Bradbury has served up a soft tyrannical state manned, not by the zealous, but by zombies. It is a world ruled by the media-addicted, the apathetic, the listless, the medicated, the overdosed, the sleeping. Books have been banned, and consigned to the Flame, not because of a despotic regime, but by the common, courteous consensus of a modern democracy desperately eager not to give offense to anyone.

Sound familiar?

Much like "1984", "Fahrenheit 451" works because it drills down on an unlikely protagonist. Guy Montag, at least when we meet him, sincerely loves his job. His fellow firemen are not zealots or fascists, but simply pragmatic working men who enjoy what they do. There are unpleasant aspects to the work, naturally---among them the incineration of an old eccentric woman who prefer to die with her beloved books---but like most of "Fahrenheit 451"'s society, Montag prefers not to think about it. Take a pill, or better still take two---and don't call me in the morning. For Montag, truly, it is a 'pleasure to burn'.

Like most revolutions, though, Guy Montag is simmering from within; dissatisifed with his wife, whose stomach must be pumped on the very evening he returns from the euphoria of the Burn; dissatisifed with the apathetic society in which he lives; dissatisfied with a job which fails to give expression to the rebel soul that burns within, that impels him to challenge his wife's brazen, flippant friends. There are three catalysts that propel Montag to rebellion: the girl Clarisse, whom he befriends; the immolation of the old woman at the Fire; and his own clandestine book collection.

"Fahrenheit 451" succeeds as both jeremiad and prophecy, true, but it also engages because Bradbury is a literary master: his spare, mechanical narrative of Montag's wife having her stomach pumped by two callous, dirty, jocular technicians practically breathes pure horror, and is one of the most soul-deadening passages I have ever read.

But "451" also succeeds because it is a mirror of our own increasingly apathetic, violent, media-saturated world: is it so hard to see ourselves in Montag's trackless, cookie-cutter suburban landscape where bookish teenage girls are run down beneath the wheels of speeding pranksters, themselves bored and looking for the cheap thrill of ultra-violence? Is it so hard to see ourselves in the avidity of the Television Audience, watching the panicked, doomed, frantic rictus face of the condemned man stalked by the mechanical Hound, the images of his death broadcast back by the electronic antennaes on the monster's back? Isn't that merely COPS or "Survivor" with a bite?

"Fahrenheit 451" is the most terrifying book I have ever read.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Maybe Someone Should Have Burned This Book
Review: Rubbish, complete rubbish. Firemen are heroes, they saved us in the world trade center attacks and countless other times, and for this Bradbury fruit to come around attacking them just for doing their job, then what kind of a world are we living in? Maybe in the future, ideas will be dangerous. They already are, I mean, free speech is one of the reasons there is terrorism. I know I wouldn't mind books being burnt if it meant protecting my security, especially this cruddy book. Bradbury doesn't understand that ideas are okay, but not worth safety, which 9/11 proved. I recommend reading a good potboiler thriller instead, such as Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: AN UNEDUCATED SOCIETY
Review: Guy Montag is a fireman. His job description differs from the job of firemen of our society. Guy's job is to burn books and the houses of those who conceal them. Guy stumbles upon a woman unlike any other he has met before. Her name is Clarisse. She is very different than anybody else from this society. Guy takes long walks with her and listens to her as much as possible. This is the beginning of Guy's rebel against society.
One night, Guy responds to a call about a woman concealing books. They find them and Guy happens to pick one up and hide it in his jacket. The woman is so in love with her books that she burns herself with them. Guy wonders why she had done that and why people have such a passion for books. He seeks these answers and reveals 24 books he had stolen. He sought an old acquaintance named Faber to help him understand them.
Faber read him the books he presented and explained the logic behind them while Montag thought up a way to beat the system of the firemen. His plan is working when books are reported at his house and he is forced to burn his house himself. He is so enraged that he burns the fire chief and races off for the country.
In this rural area he meets a group of men full of knowledge. They talk for a long time until they decide to move. They are walking when jets fly overhead and drop bombs on the city in view many miles away. The city collapses and Guy is speechless while thinking about all of the lost lives. He also sees this as a new beginning; a chance to show the flaws of an uneducated society.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great book from a good writer
Review: At some point, Ray Bradbury states in his novel 'Fahrenheit 451': 'The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies'. Bearing this in mind, it is doubtless that Bradbury is included among the good writers. In his novel, he managed to create a parable about the intellectual wakening of a man and the dangers of censorship, in a society where people are not allowed to think.

In an undefined future, the firemen job is to start fire. They are supposed to burn books, and the houses of people who keep published material. Guy Montag is a fireman who has never questioned the pleasures of burning, until one day when out of curiosity he takes a copy of a book home and together with his wife he tries to read. However, they have never read a book, and while they can read, they are not able to understand, to connect the sentences. This is just the awakening of Montag's mind. We know there is something about him, and that he won't be the same until we reach the last page.

Rather than being far fetcher Bradbury created a timeless story. Things like those describes in the book have been happening for ages. We may not literally burn books, but books, newspapers and magazines are burnt everyday. Like he describes in the book it began with one minority ripping one paragraph, then another, then one more... until the day that it would be better to burn the whole book. We live in the age of minorities, and we should watch out some request.

The present edition is followed by an 'Afterword' and a 'Coda' written by Bradbury in first person. In the first he tells specifically about this novel, the process of writing and once more give voice to his characters to talk about themselves and they world they --and us-- live. In the second part, the writer talks about how timeless his novel indeed is. These two last chapters are very clarifying and help a lot in the understanding of the book. My suggestion is: read this novel, think of it, and see how the world can be one day. And then do your part to avoid things in this book becoming real, because 'Fahrenheit 451' can be anything, but far fetched.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Confusing
Review: Fahrenheit 451 is a book with a lot of confusing symbolism between good and evil.Reading the book becomes fun when you can relate the events in the book to your own life. Except for burning almost every book it is suprisingly close to our lives now. Fahrenheit 451 is confusing and sometimes boring but overall it's not bad. The main character of Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag, lives in a very demented world were owning books is illegal.


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