Rating: 
Summary: George Orwell and his brilliant intelligence !
Review: This is a vignette selection of this admirable English writer. The most haunting esay would be to my mind How the poor people die , a very touching reference around the fear felt for the poor people to the hospitals.
Lear , Tolstoi and the fool is a fascinating tour de force work in which Orwell reveals the deep aversion of Tolstoi for Shakespeare specially in King Lear where Tolstoi this is the most insane work of this overrated writer according his point of view . He dares to conclude Shakespeare was never an artist , he argues that Shakespeare worked out under the Machiavelian principle the goal justifies the ways . And believe or not Tolstoi dares to affirm the presence of the fool in the play has no sense . Obviously Tolstoi had many blind points and that blindness may be well in the fact it is difficult for a human being born in a nation controlled by a Czarist Regime almost ten centuries about the involved issues in the Aristocratic atmosphere of a country wahich worked as World Empire ; that little detail may be the great difference when to the eyes of Tolstoi the Czarist Regime was authoritarian but never reached the scope about the internal affairs of the power specially in this work who might be well an anti climax and totally different in spirit to the rest of Shakespeare works .
Politics against literature : An exam of Gulliver travels is a careful study and analysis of the meaning of this bitter novel .
The jewel crown may be shared for these three essays : the politics and the English Idiom in which he deals with the decadence and the terrible employment of the idiom , Reflections about Gandhi and Reconsiderations about James Burnham .
A fundamental text for those who are really interested in this notable thinker , the same author of 1984 and Animal Farm.
Rating: 
Summary: Still as fresh and incisive as when they were written
Review: This is one of the four or five books which, of all the books I've read, have become indispensable to me. Orwell's fiction is sometimes clumsy, but his non-fiction is unerring. In this form, he is better than the people he praises. He is thorough without being boring (better than Huxley), insightful without being abstract (better than Eliot), instricate without abstrusion (better than Joyce), and honest without over-stating the obscene (better than Miller). He is always aware that there are two sides to a debate, and he is skilled at addressing both while furthering his own arguments. He is, for me, one of the defining authors of the human condition, especially regarding what it means to be human in Western society in the current age.
Rating:
Summary: This Guy Is Nuts.
Review: This is the man who wrote "1984," the single most frightening piece of fiction I have ever read.Still... In this excellent collection of works that is only slightly duplicated in "The Orwell Reader," Mr. Orwells sees fit to to critically analyze the worlds of smutty post cards and boy's 2-penny newspapers. I kid you not. They make amazing, and amazingly funny reading. With the same zeal and clear critical thought that Orwell applied to the Spanish Civil War and homeless countrymen, he analyzes the art and purpose of smutty post cards. What a hoot! Actually, it is refreshing. This is big fun.
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