1984

Rating:
Summary: Dark and Bold
Review: 1984 is written in the style of the "negative utopia." It is a dark vision of a future society in which personal freedom has been destroyed and in which a small group have established dictatorial control over the many. It was written mainly as a warning against authoritarianism and totalitarianism.....not just the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, but also against the totalitarianism of the mind that is currently evolving in capitalist culture as well. Orwell was a socialist. This is only relevant to counter those who say that Orwell was criticizing socialism. He most certainly was not...socialists stand for personal freedom and economic democracy.

This is a very well written book with a good plot. Orwell's vision was a clear one and a danger that has not entirely been eliminated today.

Rating:
Summary: A Word To Those Interested In This Book
Review: Quite a dark story. It became boring at times and had a bit too much informational writing. Definitly not your average story. Well written. The plot was okay. Read it if you want the experience. I would recommend Animal Farm over this if you are looking for dystopian socities. It is much more light hearted and easier to read.

Rating:
Summary: A perspective into the Future....
Review: I read this book in an honors lit class in 9th grade and was surprised to find that it was not a suspended book at my high school yet (and at the same time I was glad it wasn't). Now I am a Junoir and able to fully apprieciate the well written polital novel. As I recall, it is about a man named Winston and is based in the furture where the government was nearly in complete control over a person and their thoughts. This place is Oceana which is located in London and at war or allienced with East Asia and Eurasia (Winston is the only one who knows the truth to this and is therefore especially watched closely as he contains top secreate information from the "Truth Ministry"). Big Brother is the politacal party that controls London and the secrete police is basically it's secrete weapon to reading the peoples thoughts and killing them off. Winston falls in love with a woman (illigally) named Julia and therefore ends up joining the Brotherhood (good political party against Big Brother). Here we see telescreens that are hidden all over secrete and public places to moniter peoples movements and thoughts. Winston gets caught doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing and is sent to one of the prisons (the most interestingly detailed part in the novel). Here Wiston must face the ultimate punishment of his life...his own fear. Read it, ponder over it, and fear it, and enjoy it. I've even heard that today London has at least 1 survalence camera for every 15 people (sounds kind of like the telescreens to me).....

Rating:
Summary: Sweet!
Review: I first read this book on a friend's reccomendation and since then, it has become one of my favorite books of all time. many other reviews give you the plot summary, so i won't bother. I would highly reccomend this book to anyone, especially someone who wants to think about the direction our society is heading. it's kinda disturbing, but only because it's plausable.
happy reading.

Rating:
Summary: Which is the scarier thought?
Review: To think that by 1984 we had begun to exhibit some of the ideas Orwell expressed in his novel, or that so many believed that none of it had come true?
In 1984, Orwell paints the vision of a world layered with Marxist and Socialist philosophies, a place where individual freedom is being oppressed and forgotten. Told through the perspective of Winston Smith, a member of The Party, Orwell shows the struggles and consequences of a man daring to go against The System.
It is a riveting tale injected with political and social philosophy. A timeless classic that will certainly be revisited by future generations and very likely passed off as "incorrect predictions" because the concepts Orwell covers are too frightful to entertain as reality. From Big Brother watching citizens through Telescreens to the past being rewritten from one moment to the next.
I highly recommend this novel to not just science fiction fans but to all citizens of the present, as a reminder that freedom is only a reality as long as we do not take it for granted.

Rating:
Summary: Read the book
Review: I suspect that most readers of these reviews have already read (&/or reviewed) the book in question. I'm not going to precis 1984 for the remaining readers but simply state that the writing is understated and matter of fact but nevertheless compelling, many points are subtly made and perhaps one sentance in 10 could be used as an aphorism or commentary of 'modern life', whether it be organised sport, national events or geopolitics. Nothing else comes close to that hit-rate, except a dictionary of quotations.

For the few who have not yet read the book, see what you're missing!

(ps - it was lumped together with Animal Farm, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies and various JB Priestly plays as distopian visions in my long-gone schooldays - they're all worth reading too.)

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Dystopian Novel
Review: Just finished 1984 by George Orwell. Truly, this is the best novel in the entire dystopian genre. Orwell eschews the lighthearted writing style of Aldous Huxley for an atmosphere suffused with fear and paranoia. In terms of creativity, 1984 is one of the most refreshing books I've ever read: the ideas of Newspeak and doublethink, the use of the past as a means of controlling the present; all are amazing ideas that should ring true today. Orwell's thoughts on "continuous warfare" should be especially cogent in light of the current "war on terror".

The best part of the book is Winston's stay at the Ministry of Love.

The only problem with this book is that it puts its ideas before its plot. An example: at a critical juncture in the exposition, when Winston & Julia have started working for the mysterious Brotherhood, Winston sits down and reads a book for about 25-30 pages. The ideas conveyed in the book are fascinating, to be sure, but it brings the narrative to a dead halt.

Rating:
Summary: 1984
Review: Winston is a party member in a government that controls the very thoughts of its citizens. He works diligently until he falls in love with Julia. He ignors his duties and disobeys his society. They find freedom for a while, but will it last? The society in the book is interesting and depressing, too. The characters have believable personalities. If you like happy books don't read it though. It's depressing and politcal but well written.

Rating:
Summary: More Relavent Now than Ever
Review: Anyone who is interested in the nature of power and manipulation of the masses should read this book. Despite the fact that it was orriginaly an inditement against Stalinism, it is still relevant in 21st century America.
The nature of the "War on Terror" could have been taken dirrectly from the book, in places word for word. The story provides facinating insight into the way that reasonably inteligent people can chose to behave in irrational ways in the name of partiatism and loyalty.

Rating:
Summary: The classic work on totalitariansim
Review: With the exception of "Animal Farm," it would be hard to think of a work of satire in the English language that is as powerful as "1984" (actually "Nineteen Eighty Four"). Whereas the Whig-Tory squabbles that make up the background of "Gulliver's Travels," are mostly forgotten now, the totalitarian essence of Airstrip One still haunts the imagination of the First World. No other major novel this century has produced so many memorable terms. Not simply fantasies of universal surveillance, but also "Newspeak," "Doublethink," "the Ministry of Truth," "Sex Crime" "Thoughtcrime," "Two Minute Hate," "Memory Hole," "Room 101," "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever." Indeed, not since Dickens has there been such a novelist so much on the popular consciousness.

Since there are already several hundred reviews in praise of this book, I will devote the rest of this review to providing some reservations. It is often said that Orwell is a master analyst of totalitarianism. Dead wrong, in my view. On the Nazi side of the Molotov-Ribbentrop symbiosis, Orwell has rather little to say. There is no systematic analysis of Nazism, no evaluation of Nazi terror, and, in retrospect most damning of all, no real appreciation of the singular importance of the Holocaust. A look at "Revenge is Sour", which opens up the fourth volume of Orwell's collected journalism, reveals his limitations dramatically. However just and liberal his opposition to revenge is, Orwell's account fails because he has never had any experience which could make him understand those feelings. It is like reading a denunciation of pornography from a cardinal who has been blind from birth.

What is most powerful in Orwell's account is his satire on Communist dishonesty. (About Nazi irrationalism and fanaticism he has little to say.) Why Oceania commits the barbarisms it does is more open to question. Rather oddly, given his frequent skepticism about Progressive pieties, Orwell appears to believe that a growing economy would be in itself sufficient to provide the goods and services a just society needs. Since the three world states wish to prevent that, they encourage endless war which wastes any surplus, and which supports their own regimes by permanent war psychosis. The result is an endless stagnation, and a horrifying stability which could last forever.
Now an economic slowdown was clearly a problem with the Soviet Union in the last decades of its life, but equally clearly it was not intended to be that way. More importantly, the worst Communist atrocities, Collectivization and the Great Leap Forward were attempts to radically change society. Soviet Stalinism was a society that went through every sort of radical change imaginable. It was not a society whose crimes were rooted in stasis.

Other objections. England no longer exists, there is only "Airstrip One." Orwell set his nightmare world in England to challenge his countrymen's complacency. But arguably he reinforced it by showing that it could only occur in an England which was already dead. It was perhaps this aspect that appealed to Czeslaw Milosz and other Polish exiles who viewed their own country as an innocent swamped and threatened by Russian aggression imposing a thoroughly UnPolish society. While this view had a great deal of truth to it, the fact that the former Communists have won two free presidential elections in a whole, suggests that it is not the whole truth. Viewing totalitarianism as a deracinated purging of authentic local traditions has obvious limits. Clearly the Axis countries were militantly nationalist, and it is clear that Communist regimes could not have survived in China, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea without successfully appealing to some aspects of nationalism and national culture. All Communist countries appealed to local traditions (has there ever been any kind of regime that did not?), and Orwell should have taken this into account. Likewise romantic love is viewed as Winston's salvation, yet Claudia Koonz, Geoff Eley have pointed out how Nazism gained strength from its appeal to conventional ideas of family. And Richard Stites has pointed out that Stalin's policy cannot simply be viewed as anti-family.

Another weakness of the book is its view of Stalinism as one based on intellectuals. While it could be said of Lenin's dictatorship that the government was dominated by intellectuals, one could not really apply that term to Beria, Zhadanov, or Molotov. Too much concentration on the sins of a Heidegger distracts one from the far greater crimes of the Wehrmacht and I.G. Farben. But the greatest weakness of the book is O'Brien. O'Brien's lust for power is so deranged as to be pyschotic. That he lives only for others to suffer tells us nothing about how torturers work. (It does not help the book that Orwell cannot tell the metaphysical difference between a statement such as "Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939." and "2+2=4". The first is a historical fact, the second is a tautology. It would be evil to try to torture people to deny the first, madness the second.) In his portrait Orwell reveals his inability to understand such a personality. Indeed, such a person could not really be human at all. Surely in the name of all that is humane and tolerated, he must be extirpated, like a demon. Arendt's concept of the banality of evil or Sartre's view of the anti-Semite have their limitations, but they tell us more than Orwell does, as does, from the inside as it were, Celine's own later novels.