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Summary: I hated it then, I appreciate it now. A great book!!
Review: When i first read this book, i was in 9th grade and i was 15, now admitedly, i haven't grown up that much since then, as i just started 10th grade, but my feelings about this book have totally changed. when i read it, i hated it. i thought it was just awful. too sad. but now i look back, and i realize what a wonderful book it was, maybe not happy, but good. so true. it had such a powerful message that couldn't be ignored. i am now so glad that i read it. i think that everyone should read it. you may not find that it is the most entertaining thing that you have ever read, but if you sit and think about the book, and then about society, you would really see things in a totally different light. it really opened my eyes. i really think that everyone should read this book. you will never regret it, in fact, you will be extremely pleased that you read it. there is no way you couldn't be glad you read it. maybe you will be like me, and you won't like it while you're reading it, but once you are done, you will be glad that you read it. so please, read it.
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Summary: 1984 has come and gone
Review: Orwell, for a skinny accountant-looking Englishman who's real name is Eric Blair, you rock for this single shining moment in literature history. Yeah, kudos to you.The nightmarish world of 1984 has yet to hit us yet, though we are getting there sometime. His world of Oceania is completely thourough and believable, with many similarities in today's society. It's an Animal Farm for the real world, no metaphors, no representations, just humans so idiots who didn't understand the latter can feel smart, too. Winston, our hero, is almost a perfect mirror image of Orwell himself, wandering around the plot and pointing out the ways people will try to control you without even really trying to point it out. It is written so well it just speaks for itself. It doesn't need to be explained, it is understood at first glance. The world is alive with sugar rations, forced morning exercises, paroles, betrayals, hipocrisy, and chestnut trees (You'll understand all too well when you finish the book). Winston sees cracks, deep and ominous, in his utopia and eventually tries to rebel against it only to be "re-educated". The book explores the meanings of truth, of history, of what really is for our own good. From the first sentence to the last four words, this book is one that will stay with you forever.
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Summary: 1984
Review: 1984 excellently depicts a negative utopia, a world in which government is everything and everywhere, and individuality means nothing. A man named Winston rises up to find the truth and to see through the government coverups. Since the government is so allpowerful and corrupt, it allows such people as Winston to rise up just for the joy of crushing them and turning them into mindless believers. 1984 is like the other great negative utopias, Brave New World and Farenheit 451, because in all books the governemnt controls all aspects of life. However, Brave New World uses material pleasures such as the drug somna to control it's citizens, Farenheit 451 burns books to keep it's citizens ignorant, and 1984 uses fear. In 1984 there are thought-police, people who can see you at any time through TVs, even in your own home. They would arrest those who would even just made 'face crime,' or not supporting the government even through just one upset glance. These three books are very exciting and while these futures may or may not be happen, it shows us that the human spirit will always strive for knowledge and individualism, even against impossible odds.
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Summary: Greatest book of English lit, candidate for top 5 of world?
Review: Foreshadowing Pynchon's paranoia, this text is well beyond its projected 1984 date. An allagory for all people and all types of government, it is ultimately about the individual and his place in the world. Highly, highly recommended. Feel manipulated while reading it by keeping in mind that Orwell was also a linguist.
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Summary: A look at our future, from our past
Review: When Orwell originally wrote 1984, it was to be called 1948. This was because he'd figured that by 1948 the world would be split into "superstates", and all a form of some totalitarianism or other. And a terrifyingly new kind of totalitarianism. One that utilizes technology to invade the privacy of every one of it's citizens. Orwell gave us the term "big brother is watching". And this is done by cameras that are placed everywhere. Knowing it to be impossible for someone to watch you 24 hours a day is small comfort when you never know when you're being watched. It bothers me that Orwell is not considered to be one of the great authors of the 20th century, as he was so adept at breaking down complex societies, and goverments into contexts that most everyone can understand. Both in 1984, and Animal Farm. 1984 is the story about an average man who finds more and more that the life he's leading, and the government he works for is wrong. Horribly wrong. The society he lives in is sick. In time he discovers, through a forbidden book, that the decades long war they've been fighting against the other superstates is actually a fabrication based on the concept that war can sustain an entire economy, because everything that a society produces is destroyed. And that stoking the fears and hatreds towards the other superstates can create a nucleus that a society can form it's self around. We are versed on double-think, and double-speak; where one can spout, and believe government rhetoric, all the while knowing the truth right in front of their face. The book is endlessly fascinating, well written, and deeply provocative. It is, after all, a classic.
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Summary: One of the most powerful book I have read
Review: George Orwell's 1984 is a riveting story of science-fiction where everyone is constantly watched and every move analysed. It is also, and more, a sociological book about totalitarism. It asks the question?: What if the government could read your mind? How could they control your life? What do they need to do to control your life? How to they get you to think like they do? The answer to all is by controlling the media. You control the information the public gets, then you can control their opinion. It is a book about power and how bad it can get. It also talks aboutthe different classes in the society, how they act toward each other. Even if the book was written quite some time ago, the answers it provides are still quite accurate, and that's what makes it such a powerful book.
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Summary: A portrait of the menacing, looming threat of corpitarinism
Review: It's 1984, we're behind schedule. -Louis Freech Chief Off. CIA. Our freedoms are being stripped from us by the vaccum caused by the cultural void stemming from the increasingly intimate relationship that big-business and big-government share. This is no nation "for the people, by the people." Justice cannot be bought under this system, but you can always buy your way out of the system. No-one ever says anything, until they take away your ability to say anything!
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Summary: A great book of English literature
Review: I would recommend this book to a reader who is looking for a highly intelligent story. 1984 invisions a future where superpower governments oppress the masses, killing off individual thought. Constantly watched by cameras, people living in these superpowers are essentialy slaves. The story is gripping and well written. 1984 is very similar to Brave New World, these two "utopias" are both trying to eradicate individuality. Brave New World tries to smother the individual with material pleasures, whereas 1984 uses oppression and false truths to achieve these ends. The books focus on characters who rebel against these governments. Their struggle for individuality ends in disaster, but their struggles provide an interesting insight into the human soul.
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Summary: Orwell's last, grimmest, funniest book
Review: I think I first read "1984" when I was about 10, twenty-odd years ago. I still have my old copy of it, a now highly tatty and heavily-taped-up Penguin edition. I remember wondering if it would come true in four years time and being a bit worried about it. The thing about "1984" is that it's such a weird bouillabaisse of critical analysis, dystopian fantasy and Orwell's own personal obsessions. All of these things bounce off each other in the most tangled and confusing ways. There's no doubt that many of the features of the book, such as the Two Minutes Hate, have proved to be chillingly funny prophecies, when you compare them to contemporary media phenomena such as the preposterous reversal of Saddam Hussein's public image in the West when he made the big mistake of invading a friendly country (from stern Friend of Democracy to swarthy Satan in a matter of weeks, thanks to a lot of hard work by the American press). Newspeak, also, has a certain currency, when we think of such phrases as "friendly fire" and "precision bombing". But it has to be said that, if you're looking for a clear and rational book about What, as Marvin Gaye would have said, is Goin' On, then you have to conclude that Orwell's genius for fantasy overrode his intelligence. This book is suffused with Orwell's own personal attitudes to a degree not often recognised. The utter inability of Winston Smith to find any real hope in the proles has been belied by the persistence into the 21st century of popular dissent. I'm talking about things like the WTO riots and the use made of the internet (a technology developed chiefly by the Pentagon, remember) as a tool for political critique and activist organisation. I'm even talking about the Romanian revolution, in which one of the most downtrodden peoples in Europe rose up and deposed - by which I mean, arrested and shot - one of the worst dictators of the century. Orwell's fatalistic sense of the _totality_ of evil is what's bad about the book, if you're looking for clear answers and good thoughts, but on the other hand, if you read the book not as a dire warning but as a satire, it's what's _good_ about it. The pompous lectures of O'Brien read more like the ramblings of a Sade character than as an authentic account of what it is to want power at the turn of these centuries. The evidence is that most of the really powerful and dangerous people in the world are not like O'Brien, in that they aren't in it for the dubious pleasure of "stamping on the human face forever". They're in it for money, sex and the thrill of feeling important. This makes them vulnerable. This means they can be stopped. The other thing that we tend to notice about "1984" is the pervasive nostalgia of the book. Orwell was not just born in to the middle-class; one some pretty deep level, and despite his truly heroic efforts to change, he was marked by its values and attitudes to the end of his life, and while this gave him great strength, it also narrowed and sharpened his imagination. The points of value in this book are the old notebook, the half-forgotten nursery rhymes, the piece of coral in the ancient paperweight. Nothing new is good. Things fall apart as soon as bought (the Victory cigarette). This narrowness of imagination can seem to spoil the book, but _only_ as long as we expect it to be some sort of honest effort to imagine life in the future. I sometimes wonder if Orwell meant people to take "1984" as seriously as they do. I think it's a brilliant, very blackly comic fantasy, something Swift might have written if he'd lived to see the concentration camps (and don't forget that Orwell wrote eloquently and wittily about Swift; check out the essays and war broadcasts). I'm still glad I read it 20 years ago, and I still read it today. As a book about the importance of a life without dirt, bad cigarettes, horrible food and awful TV, it can't be beat. As a ground plan for Media Studies, it's superb. As a prophecy? Hmmm. No. It's a satire. Take it as gospel and you'll be crushed under its wheels; take it as a dark joke, and you can gain strength from it.
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Summary: 1984- just rename it 2030. It's a prophetic warning...
Review: A wake up call!! This eerily prophetic book should serve as warning to all of the horrors of collectivist totalitarianism and of the seductive snares that lead us there. This books best value is a warning against collectivist totalitarianism. It is all the more scary, because of the stark parallel between the trilateral blocs of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia and our world with the European Union and it's developing superstate counterparts, the American Union and Asian Union.
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