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Summary: Ideas Can Be Unpleasant
Review: Ray Bradbury uses the idea of a book burning society in Fahrenheit 451 to represent the destruction that popular culture has wrought on the intellectual exchange that existed before the advent of mass market entertainment. If given the choice between easy and difficult, most people will choose easy. Books represent the hard things in life. They contain ideas and opinions that may be different from our own and that may challenge us to think and understand in ways that we never comprehended before.One key thing to understand about Bradbury's masterpiece is that the book burning didn't come from the government. It started with the populace progressively ignoring books because they upset too many people. It began with minority groups (anyone from Chinese to left-handed people) ripping 'offensive' pages from books and destroying them. So began the homogenating process that is popular culture and group identity. In F. 451, Guy Montag is a fireman. In this world firemen start fires, they don't stop them. They burn the houses that harbor the illegal books. Montag runs across a teenage girl named Clarisse who challenges Montag's view of the world. She gets him to do the most dangerous thing that any person can do: think. Once Montag starts to think about his world and what he does, he is destined to either rebel against this repressive society or kill himself (which many of Montag's fellow citizens opt to do). F. 451 shows that it's not books that are revolutionary but the free flow of ideas that they promote. The wall-tv in the parlor is everything that is wrong with Montag's world and our's as well. The wall-tv literally drowns out any chance that people will communicate once they set themselves in front of its addicting glow. The sweet irony of all this is that man has used his brain so well that we have come to a point where we no longer have to think to survive. We have created countless machines that do our thinking for us. In F. 451 no one really thinks about what they do, they just do it. It's what the do, it's what they've always done, so it's what they'll always continue to do. Until of course somewhere along the way someone steps outside of himself and observes himself going about his routine and questions it. The most dangerous man in the world is the man who asks not just how but why.
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Summary: Full of Metaphors
Review: "Fahrenheit 451," by Ray Bradbury, shows the theme of men and women not thinking for themselves, but letting others make decisions for them. Many want a perfect world, where everything goes right, but when people gain knowledge of something it causes segregation of beliefs resulting in problems. Bradbury acknowledges this, but tries to convey the message that, with knowledge of the past, we can understand the reason for mistakes made and prevent them from happening again. Another message that is presented is that the people are afraid of knowing things: thinking scares them. They let others think for them, in this case the government. "Fahrenheit 451" is full of metaphors that, when understood, compliment the theme. One metaphor is the mechanical hound. It is a computerized animal used as the government's way of punishing its enemies. The hound shows the power dictatorship has the power the government has to enforce. The seashells which people listen to are used to promote the policies of the government. The seashells can be thought as to help, "drift these people off to sea," as seashells would drift out to sea. Finally fire is used often as a subject of metaphors. Burning the books is a way to make them non-existent. The government doesn't want the books because the knowledge in the books contradicts the governmental policy. They burn them, like one would burn a piece of trash if they didn't want it.
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Summary: Terifying ideas...
Review: Part of the appeal of this sort of book, books like '1984' or 'Brave New World' is that we can look at them retrospectively. Written mostly in the earlier part of the last century, they predicted just what sort of messes we would have created for ourselves in the next. The ideas their authors came up with were always just possible; in many cases some of the things the authors dreamed up came true, or almost so. It's chilling to consider that these books were written as 'worst case scenarios' of the time in which we now live. So it is with Fahrenheit 451 - much of the appeal of this book is it's consideration of just how far the TV craze would go, and how dumbed down the western world would become. The book is set not very far into our future, possibly this decade - how close are we to the sort of censorship Bradbury imagined? How much has our sense of community disappeared? How dumb are we? The interest for me, lay in these questions. I wouldn't consider 'Fahrenheit 451' great literature. I didn't think the writing was particularly skillful, or the plot incredibly suspensful. But the ideas Bradbury writes about make this book great. It really is one of those modern classics you should bother to read, especially if you enjoy Dystopian fiction like 'The Handmaid's Tale, 'Brave New world', or '1984)' or science fiction of any sort. Another one that, although it may seem like light reading or pulp as you are reading it, will stay with you for a good few days after you've put it aside and moved onto the next book.....
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Summary: Burn it!
Review: This book, whilst very good to begin with, fails in the end beacause Bradbury attemptes to beat his message in too late in the piece. He spends too much time describing the story, and his message, as he has rendered it, is too complex to cram into 180 pages. I was told to read this book in school, but was not forced, as i have a passion for reading. Anyone who now loves the name "clarrise" for the sole fact that she was a nice person in the novel is a wierdo. But, other than that, i found it to be a tolerablebook, up until the death of beatty, when the novels plot development peters out, and we are left feeling cudgeled for the rest of the novel by its "moral" Im only 13, so nyah BURN THE BOOK! bradbury has failed miserably in creating this book.
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Summary: Poor Man's Brave New World
Review: This "classic" left me with the feeling as though it had been written by a very talented 10th-grader. The basic premise was interesting (if somewhat borrowed from Huxley's Brave New World)but by virtue of sophomoric storytelling, overly unrealistic and flowery dialogue and huge leaps in logic the writer wasn't very effective in suspending my disbelief.
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Summary: A glimpse at the future
Review: The classic novel, " Fahrenheit 451," by Ray Bradbury, takes a journey into the future. The novel is about a fire fighter named Guy Montag whose job is to actually start fires. In the society of the future, no one asks questions or thinks for themselves. Montag and his fire starting colleagues are paid to light books on fire and watch them burn. Montag meets a seventeen-year old girl who tells him about times when people treasured books and when a fireman's job was to extinguish fires. Filled with curiosity about the past, Montag starts hiding books in his home and reading them. His wife reveals his secret to his co-workers and Montag is forced to burn his own stash. Montag then meets philosophers who have stored the contents of books in their heads so that when people need and want the knowledge, it is there. Bradbury brings out a statement of theme that is not revealed without careful analysis of the story. The theme that Bradbury presents is that even the simplest things are important and make up a culture and society as we know it. One man realizes this and finds in himself that he was allowed to appreciate and
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Summary: Farenheit 451
Review: I think this is a very good bok, but I thought it was a little borring. I read this book as an English III assignment. It was very insightful to the society we live in today and yet in some aspects very far off. Bradbury's predictions of how the future will be/is is very weird and cool and disturbing of how our society is and how he talked about school shootings long before they ever occured. I think overall this was a good book and a very good book for discussion.
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Summary: Intense, searing and frightening, if a little confusing.
Review: While sometimes hard to follow, Ray Bradbury's science fiction classic is still intense and searing when at its best and bears many frightening resemblences to our own world. This futuristic civilization regards cursory items such as magazines as better than books; the television has pretty much taken over; there's even a mention of kids frequently killing each other. Pretty amazing stuff, considering Bradbury wrote this way back in 1953. At least we haven't gone so far as to burn all books, but who knows; maybe things will get so bad that we just might.... CALLING ALL GUY MONTAGS!
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Summary: ¤~*ItS GrEaT*~¤
Review: This book is a bit boring once you start reading it, but it is a good book after you get into it. I would love to have read this book a long time ago. The plot is not hard to follow also! I love it!
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Summary: A testament to all of the Guy Montags out there.....
Review: This book is a classic on censorship. It also probes at human values and is almost existential in Guy's conflict over the wrong he feels is being committed in the burning of the books. This could even be a chapter out of Huxley's "Brave New World" in that the public is conditioned by what they can and cannot read through censorship. An essential for anyone.
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