Rating: Summary: Analyzing Farenheit 451 Review: The book is, from an analytical standpoint, about the meaning of life, values and the reactions of people. The book begins with the main character, Montag, as you will realize he lives the life of the classical fireman. He burns books because it is what he is paid to do, he goes home to his wife that, since they have no children, sits around and watches T.V. all day, and is completely brainwashed by the society. Montag then encounters a girl, named Clarise, who thinks about the world and he wonders. Not too much later he goes to see a professor who helps him to think, himself, and in so doing puts Montag against the society that he was the idealist for not so long ago. This book can be analyzed as an insight to the meaning of life for the different characters have such contrasted views as to what the true meaning of life is. First of all there is Montag the protagonist of the story, he changes his meaning of life from, work at my job, that isn't too bad, so I can support my wife and she can be happy. Then contrastingly to what I considered as my view on life before is flawed, because my wife isn't really happy; for two reasons, first she almost kills herself, without thinking much of it, and, second she doesn't understand how to think so she really can't be that happy anyway. This leads him to think that his purpose in life is to try and enlighten some part of the society to induce thought and maybe make people really happy instead of the temporary solutions they use all day long. The second character that is the general view you get on the people in society is Mildred, who is basically every average housewife. Mildred is a living zombie of absolute brainwashed stupidity, she really isn't capable of her own thought and she thinks she is happy, since she can't really think for herself and their isn't much material around about the meaning of life, she really doesn't have a view, but her character, or moreover what she represents matters to the story and how life is viewed by general people. The third person that shows the meaning of life that is generally accepted is that if you please your superiors you have done your job in life, this character is captain Beatty. Beatty is an interesting character he knows what Montag knows that books let people think, he has also read many but he utterly supports the government without objection or dispute. He knows what the government wants; yet he agrees and he tries to convince Montag that he is right and the government is right and he is doing what must be done. These three characters show contrasted views of three beliefs on the meaning of life, or what is good. Values are shown vividly in the book, there are different values shown, such as knowledge, material, and thought. The first example is the night call to the house where the woman burns with her books; this exemplifies value in knowledge. This is shown in what the books represent to her, she has such value in the knowledge, which the books contain, and value in the importance of this she doesn't feel she can live after they have been burned. The second instance where value is shown is in Mildred, and her value of material, in this case her parlor. The scene where this is most relevant is when Montag comes to burn the house, she complains more about her parlor as she goes away than she does about her husband who will be sent to jail. The third time value is shown though this is in no order is in Clarise. The value she represents is thought, she values thought without even having to try, she values it because her family values thought and she is fed on thought and conversation; throughout her life by her uncle and parents she is thought the value and meaning of thought, and so she expresses this value. The reactions of people are also in the theme of this book, for many times this is shown. The different reactions I will discuss are: first, the society's reaction to banning books, second the reaction Captain Beatty has to books, and third Montag's reaction to Clarise. First, I will discuss society's reaction to the banning of books. Society in this world is not so much different from ours, yet a ban against books wouldn't make sense to people, but it seems logical to people in this world. I am for the opinion that this is because the government structures the world around fast pleasure instead of the pleasure of knowledge, so it can be easy to ban books and make people into what Mildred and her friends represent. I believe given time this would easily follow through in our fast paced world, not because people wouldn't fight but because of people that wouldn't really care. The second reaction I would like to discuss is the reaction of Captain Beatty to his reading of books. This is intriguing, because even after reading many books Beatty still hates them, this is odd since the general reaction to something you hate is not to do it, yet Beatty knows his enemy like a friend an intelligent, hateful method of enforcing your opinion. The third, is Montag's reaction to Clarise, she doesn't have to do much to catalyze his thought, this is most likely due to the fact that he thinks a lot but not about the right things. To conclude this book has many an Interesting aspect to it, and is worth a good read, make sure to remember not to be a person that doesn't care.
Rating: Summary: The Temperature At Which Books Burn Review: I give Fahrenheit 451 five stars because it is very interesting and pulls the reader into the life of Guy Montag, the main character and narrator. Ray Bradbury uses great imagery in this book so that the reader can picture exactly what Montag sees. Another thing that makes this book so great are the ideas that we take for granted such as thinking. In this book there are very few people who can think for themselves. It also makes you question things like, if there were no book would people still be able to think for on there own? This is a really great book. In this book you will read about a society that is very different from our own. This society takes place in the future. All the houses there are fire proof making firemen obsolete for their old job. There the firemen start fires instead of putting them out. Instead of using water they now use kerosene. Their job is to burn books and the houses they are in as soon as they are found. They follow strict rules which are1. Answer the alarm swiftly, 2. Start the fire swiftly, 3. Burn everything, 4. Report back to firehouse immediately, and 5. Stand alert for other alarms. According to them the first firehouse was built in 1790 to burn books. The first fireman was Benjamin Franklin. All books are banned from everyone. Being caught with a book is a punishable offense. This was Montag's job. He never questioned why he burned them or anything else in his life. Until he meet a girl named Clarisse McClellan who helped him start to think for himself. She asked him questions he never thought of before such as if he was happy and she pointed things out that he never noticed like how the billboards got longer because the cars got faster. All these new realizations helped Montag open his mind to start thinking and opened his eyes to what the government was doing. Clarisse spends her days outside exploring her environment and thinking about how strange the world is. She does not go to school because people think of her as anti-social when she just has a different idea of what being social is. Montag sees her doing some of the most peculiar things such as shaking a walnut tree or knitting a blue sweater. He saw her outside one day in the rain and she explained that she loved the way the rain tasted. Montag had never thought about how rain tasted and that day on the way to work he tilted his head back and opened his mouth to taste the rain. This was not the only time she told Montag something that got him thinking. One morning when they were talking and she told him she thinks dry leaves smell like cinnamon. Her odd revelations to him helped him think more and more. Montag starts to question all the people around him but mostly his wife, Mildred. She does nothing all day except watch her three-wall TV. He realizes he does not truly love her because he does not really know her at all. One night Mildred has two friends over to watch the three-wall TV. Montag listens to there conversation. They were talking about the up coming war and one woman said that her husband is in the army. She talked about how her husband might die but its okay because it's the third marriage for both of them and she won't have ant trouble getting over it. This shows Montag that people are incapable of feeling also. They can't think or feel they just live life and care only of themselves. Another person that helps Montag to start to think and question authority was an old professor called Faber. Montag had met Faber in a park a long time ago and Montag decides to call and then visit him. Faber tells him of a time when people read books and were not afraid of being caught with them. Faber lost his job as a professor when one year he came back to teach and only one student had signed up for the coarse. Faber thinks of himself as a coward because he loves book and believes that they should not be banned but he does not do anything to stop it. He was there when books were being banned and he said nothing because he was afraid. But Faber's compassion and wisdom give Montag courage. Faber stays in his house all the time and creates new inventions. One invention is a little speaker you put in your ear so you can talk to someone. Montag and Faber use this to there advantage. These characters help Montag a lot through out the book. If it were not for them Montag would have never started to realize what he has to do. He must change the society in some way but how? He is only one man. It all starts when he confronts his fire chief, Beatty. But to find out what happens read Fahrenheit 451. This book is a page-turner and you won't want to put it down.
Rating: Summary: Censorship in an alternate society Review: The story, Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, is about an alternate society set in the future where cars travel 100 miles per hour, TV walls interact with people and books are banned. Guy Montag is an enthusiastic fireman, who enjoys pouring kerosene over books and burning them and the entire house. In this society, firemen do not put out fires. They start them. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. This book was action-packed and involved a lot of good writing. For example there were many metaphors in this book. They helped to connect Montag's society to ours, and show the frightening similarities between the two. Mildred Montag is Guy Montag's wife. She is an example of the people the government wants to create. Mildred is shallow and cares more about her possessions than about herself or her husband. Also, Mildred never shows interest in what Montag has to say. She regards him as an annoying younger brother rather than her husband. Mildred is the stereotypical housewife of this time period. She values all the things her society does. She seems to not think for herself, and only knows what the society wants her to know. In the beginning of this book, Montag seems perfectly content with his life and his job. He says it is a pleasure when he burns people's houses. He loves the smell of kerosene that comes from his job, and 'wears it like a perfume'. Then one day Montag meets a girl named Clarrise McClean, and his life changes forever. Clarrise is a peculiar girl for the time period. She thinks. She enjoys smelling the leaves in fall, staying up late at night talking and watching the stars. Clarrise seems like a girl that came from our time period and was placed in Montag's. The norm for teenagers in this book is to play video games, play sports, and kill each other. There are many gangs in this society and often innocent teenagers are shot. Also, teenagers like to drive their cars hundreds of miles per hour to see how many people they can run off the road. If a pedestrian were to be crossing the street in this society, they would most definitely be killed. However, no one walks anywhere. Rather, they take the subway or they drive to wherever they need to go. Pedestrians are seen as weird and are often watched by the police to make sure they don't do anything illegal. When Montag meets Clarrise and talks to her, he immediately wants to know more about her. She is unusual to him, and he likes that. Montag loves the way Clarrise doesn't care about what anyone else thinks of her. Clarrise teaches Montag to question society when the society seems wrong. The day after Montag met Clarrise, the firemen were called to a site where there were books in need of burning. Montag seemed detached from the routine that usually captured his every waking hour. The firemen were at the house of a woman who had hidden books in her attic. When the other firemen were pouring kerosene over the books, getting ready to burn them Montag stole one. He put the offensive book under his jacket and in doing so saved it from being burnt. When Montag got home he revealed to Mildred the stolen book. He opened up the air vent in his room and exposed 20 more books! Mildred was horrified, and gathered the books so she could burn them in her incinerator. Montag ordered Mildred to stop and said he wanted to read the books. He reasoned the authors must have spent their whole lives writing a book and therefore the books must be worth reading. Some people were willing to die for the ideas and opinions in these books, and Montag wanted to figure out why. Mildred, like most of the society, took no interest in Montag's books. She knew that if she did, she could be sent to jail. Mildred did not want to risk ruining her reputation, or loosing her house and TV walls. After Montag realized that Mildred would be of no help to him, he decided to talk to someone. Montag needed someone who would be aware of what he was going through, and could help him understand the books. Montag recalled an elderly man, by the name of Faber, he met in the park years ago. Faber told Montag that he was once a literary professor and he loved books. Montag went to Faber's house to visit him there. He brought with him one of his stolen books; the Bible. Faber eventually helped Montag in his quest to change the society. He told him that this couldn't be done quickly, but rather after a long period of time. Montag and Faber then began to discuss a plan to change society's views. They decided to place copies of books in firemen's homes. Then they would have the homes burnt. This would cause unease within the system and hopefully cause its demise. This book is about a society similar to ours. They have censored everything possibly offesive, thus only keeping the facts. The society is terrified of stepping on the toes of minorities for fear that they will rebel. They believe the bigger your market, the less you have to handle controversy. The public doesn't want to read anything that might offend someone. This aspect of Montag's society sounds frighteningly like ours. People watch what they say in public so as not to offend anyone. Montag's society grew to hate books because they might cause an uprising. What their society wanted above all, was for everyone to be happy. The story of Fahrenheit 451 is of the coming of age of Guy Montag. It is about his heroic efforts to restore civilization to it's thinking. This was an astounding book, and it is great for people who like action, controversy, and to think about life.
Rating: Summary: As topical now as ever Review: Reading this book for the first time at the beginning of 2003, I found it remarkable that a novel about the suppression of information in an oppressive police state stands as a powerful critique of the assaults on freedom and personal liberty that the U.S. Government is now engaged in in the name of protecting its citizenry from terrorists. Who exactly are the terrorists? In the view of the shadowy government represented in the novel, they are those who hoard and protect forbidden printed works, and they are those members of an underground information subculture that commits works of literature to memory in the hope that one day, the printed page will be welcome again. In the post-9/11 America of George W. Bush and John Ashcroft, the terrorists can be anyone with a foreign-sounding last name. Even blameless American citizens are suspect. Under a provision of the USA Patriot Act, the government can force public libraries to hand over records about what books anyone has checked out, and they've furthermore made it a crime for the libraries to inform those whose library records have been invoked. Bradbury depicts a nation in which individuality is frowned upon, in which the government is deeply suspicious of its own citizenry, in which suspected "criminals" can be hunted and murdered by the state without a trial, in which content is spoon-fed to the public. In light of news stories reporting on the Total Information Awareness project in development by the NSA, how much of this can be taken as fiction? How long will it be before the cautionary tales of Bradbury and Orwell and Huxley become a nightmare reality?
Rating: Summary: A Great Book Review: This novel by Ray Bradbury is a very interesting book. Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books that you just can't put down. It's hard to say why, but you pick it up saying to yourself, "I'll just read a few pages," and you end up reading for an hor or two because of the way it puls you in. The conflict starts imddediately, solving the problem of a slow beginning that some novels have. The very first few paragraphs show Guy Montag's love for fire that eventually becomes his personal struggle as well as the struggle of the world throughout the novel. There is alot of foreshadowing that you don't really recognize until you see what it's lead to, such as how Beatty doesn't run out of the kerosene-filled house as the others, but walks slowly almost delaying when the old lady pulls out a match. In leads into something very strange later on, but I don't want to give it away. This novel plays off the old concept of how you never really know how valuable something is until its taken away, playing on something as important as making books not only rare but illegal in the future. It also shows how destructive the world has and will become, with wars lasting technically 48 hours, and are decided in less time than it takes to blink. All and all it is a very interesting and entertaining book, and I would recommend Fahrenheith 451 to anyone, whehter they are heavy readers or not so heavy readers, such as myself.
Rating: Summary: A banned book about book burning Review: When I was in high School many moons ago, there were three books about the future that were required reading. Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451. All three novels were dark looks at the future of a society that had lost its way. Fahrenhiet 451 is an a dark tale about the problems of modern life and how normal things taken for granted can be turned inside out. Bradbury's hero Montag, is a firemean that has the job of actually setting fires to burn books. For those of you who do not know, Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature that paper catches fire. His world is about modern convenience and the lack of intimacy that society had developed over time. His chance meeting with another leads Montag down a path from book burner to exile on the run trying to save what he once destroyed. Bradbury tells a tale of the redemption of a man and the hope of society by learning what is important. It is an excellent read and very thought provoking. For those of you who do not think that books can ever be burned, I named this review what I did because this book is on an official banned book list in the United States. What do those who want to ban books to our children fear from this book? Makes one wonder.
Rating: Summary: Surprisingly a reflection of today's society Review: It is pretty up to date, and reflects society, since the concept of different ideas and philosophies is ignored in favor of TV, and remembering the dull words of pop songs, and the dull and almost pointless existences of some people, reflected rather grimly in this book. It was very powerful, and a very remarkable book to say that least. Probably the most realistic and the least sci-fi influenced of all those 'utopian society' novels.
Rating: Summary: Fahrenheit Four-fifty-amazing Review: I read this book for a school project. I go to a school in Maine and I am in eighth grade. I read this book for an honors English class. I am not a really big fan of reading because I find it to be extremely boring and useless. In fact the only reason I am writing this review is because I am being forced to. This book was one of the better books that I have been forced to read over my school career. There have been some pretty horribly boring books than I have been forced to read but this one isn't that bad. In fact it is a somewhat exciting book. I would recommend this book to a student that is being made to read a book that is like this or if this book is on one of there book lists. This book was somewhat good. I am not really sure what I think about it. The book was very confusing and I found it hard to read. Now that I think about it this book was not very good. I can see why they wanted to burn books in this book because I wasn't a very big fan of this book. It was very confusing and hard to believe and a little to old. I recommend this book for people that are old enough to understand it. In my opinion this book was an OK book but for certain people.
Rating: Summary: Fahrenheit 451 Review: I read Fahrenheit 451 at school. Before I picked it my Mom was telling me how she enjoyed reading the book before me ,so naturally me being a teenager assumed that the book was going to be stupid ,but I got it anyway .It turned out that Fahrenheit 451 was one of the most enjoyable books I've ever read. It's true to life sci-fi theme puts me in the future world as depicted by Ray Bradbury where firemen are paid to start fires instead of put them out. I read the book once before but the second time around was much better. Allot of details in the book were overlooked by me the first time .It captures the decay of modern day literature to technological advances such as television and amplifies it with a sci-fi twist to the point where literature is forbidden .The reader follows the character montag through the story as the reluctant firemen begins to long for literature .His wife is addicted to television so she doesn't really help him with his self-esteem .He meets a man named Faber who helps him learn more about literature while his secret still remains kept .Eventually he ends up with a choice between his job and his life .A problems with this book is as follows ; If literature is forbidden how to they teach children ? Overall It was a good book and if you haven't read it yet I'd recommend that you do.
Rating: Summary: S-Dawggie Dawggs Revew for the Gay and Lesbian Reader Review: Do you really want to read my review? I doubt it. But if you are reading this I will actually type my opinion. WARNING: Not suitable for children under the age of 10. This book is good for anyone who enjoys burning things. I enjoyed reading this book because of all the fury and held in rage I have consumed over the years from reading [bad] books. I also enjoy burning misc. things. This was one of the better books I have been forced to read in school. I do not read much and when I must do book reports it makes school worse and worse but this book was not so bad. I do not usually get assigned good reading books as assignments. Reading is good for you. Stay in school. Read this book. I do suggest this book, however, to read this book even if not assigned. It will keep you wondering what will happen next. Keeping me on the edge of my seat is a good combination for a book when mixed with only 180 pages. This is a good book to read if you like to read AND if you hate reading and need a book report because of how short it is. I have given this book 4 stars for a good plot and it's worth reading. Writing 250 words is usually hard but when you write on constantly about nonsense it becomes easier. If you are being forced to read this book, do not fret, read it. It's not so bad. Thanks for hearing out my opinion.
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