Rating: 
Summary: The Stupidest book ever
Review: Words cannot express how unbelievably horrible this book is. I had to read this for school and it was so rediculously immature. I do not reccomaend this to any christian who does not want to put evil discust before their eyes, nor to any non-christian just because it was so horrid. This book is absolutely sick and obviously Huxley had never read the
Bible. Dont read this book. Its a waste of time.
Rating: 
Summary: A SF book which is slowly becoming reality
Review: I read this book as a teen-ager and was constantly putting it down because it was making me so nervous. I saw even then, at a young age, how possible it was for this world to become a reality. How many people try to lose themselves in drugs, alcohol, meaningless TV? We are closer to this Brave New World than we like to admit. Can this insanity our world is headed toward be stopped? I don't know but I fear that Huxley understood the human conditon all too well. We believe everything we hear on TV or read in the newspapers. Too many of us have left our intelligence and perception at the door. Wake up before it is too late and think for yourself. There was a version of Brave New World with Leonard Nimoy which presented a sort of happy ending for two people, which did not occur in the book but still leaves the Brave New World untouched. I won't say too much about John "the Savage" who was more human than the rest of the population but he is the mirror Huxley uses to show us how barren and sterile this Brave New World is. A place where every word can be uttered except mother and father. Children are born in laboratories. The family unit has been disassembled with all loyalty going to the state. As frightening as it is, it a must read for those who want to understand what is happening now and how easily it can happen. The question becomes: do we rule technology or do we allow it to rule us?
Rating:
Summary: Scary Dystopia
Review: Brave New World is Aldous Huxley's vision of a future utopia. It happens approximately 600 years in the future from now. The principles of mass production have been applied to human reproduction. There are no parents: everyone is born from bottles. There is no love or hate, there is only eternal happiness. "Everyone belongs to everyone else" is one of the sayings that people are indoctrinated with. However, since happiness is the norm there is no struggle to attain it and no sense of peace with having it. People take Soma, a drug to fight depression, every day just to excape from reality, to make life a little more "bearable". The rigid caste system is enforced by treatements to embryos while they are still in the bottles in which they are grown. The intelligent people (Alphas) are enhanced and the people who will be menial workers (Epsilons) are starved of oxygen and fed alcohol as fetuses to retard their brain and body. The main plot of the book is how a young man brought up on a Native American reservation adapts from the reservation to living in the "Brave New World". The promiscuity of the society he is thrust into completely confuses him. He doesn't understand the pursuit of pleasure to the exclusion of all else. However, this is all the inhabitants outside the reservation know. The main character is completely confused by the total lack of true emotion that they have for each other.
Rating:
Summary: Years ahead of its time
Review: I wonder what it was like for people to read and talk to Huxley before time and technology revealed how ahead of his time he was? In the year 2002 we've come to believe just about anything is possible as technology steamrolls through our lives and pretty much over us. "Brave New World" is as relevant today as it was when it was written. Pershaps more so. Why? Because we now know its more fact than fiction. Thinking Man vs. the conventional mind has and will always be the great divide. As technology offers more entertainment and caresses (the ability to keep us contented and happy) the more we give up as thinking, feeling beings. The more alien we become to our nature. "Brave New World" offers a glimpse into where we might be headed. I, however, still believe the social/econimic divide will make this a much more unstable and dangerous world than "Brave New World" allows for. Books like "Brave New World" will be eliminated (as much as possible) in this world, and the need for such books, though much greater, will become pornographic and subversive excursions shunned by a proper and polite society that does not read such rude and disgusting smut. "Brave New World" is a fast read that leaves you in a state of limbo when you turn the final page. So much happened so fast that you now need to let it churn in your mind. You need to ask yourself some important questions on how this affects you and the future of humankind. Read it, reread it, then think, then do something! Otherwise....
Rating:
Summary: A classic book and rightly so
Review: Brave New World describes a world that is at the same time completely alien and very recognizable. In this new world children do not have parents, but are produced in fertilization and conditioning centers. Already during hatching the World Controller decides who will become university stuff and who will be a backward semi-moron. After birth the people are kept in a permanent state of adolescence, with the ultimate aim to hunt after pleasure and to consume goods in order to help economy. We follow 4 individuals who make different choices with regard to their future and co-operation with the system. This book was written at a time when these matters were probably rather far-fetched and futuristic, but nowadays there are a lot of things which are frighteningly recognizable: for instance the cloning of people and the total brainless materialism and search for pleasure for the sake of pleasure. A book that makes one think and also realize how fast society has changed since this book was first published.
Rating:
Summary: Timeless conflicts
Review: Everyone loves to complain about society, to articulate the tragedies that play out when our humanity is confronted by our need for order, control and progress. And it is our contemporary lives, our advancing technology, which always seems to be at the root of every problem. Of course we must not forget that this is no new concept. Brave New World was written 70 years ago, but still speaks the same truths that we see today. Life, trauma, and isolation within society are all real and inescapable elements of the human experience, and despite our desires to avoid pain, emotion and, at times reality itself, those elements will find a way through the barricade, hunt us down and show us, at great cost, how human we truly are.
Aldous Huxley's bizarre future takes place in London, England the year of our Ford 632, a new calendar that marks the passage of time in years since the life of Henry Ford, who at the time the book was published was still the poster boy for a modern mechanized world. People are no longer born, but manufactured, not raised, but conditioned, and each one predetermined not only by genetic makeup, but also by the treatment of their fetus before they are "decanted", into the position they will hold in society. Physical ability, intelligence, and even height are determined to set apart each caste from the next. Each caste is suited for a different level of work and each caste is conditioned from birth to unquestioningly accept their lot in life.
The modern world under this system is one of constant happiness and each member of society exists in a vacuum of emotional relationship. No mothers or fathers, brothers or sisters, etc., no need for marriage or family or home, no need for any kind of monogamous sexual partnership, because "everybody belongs to everybody", or so they recite like a mantra along with all the other catch phrases of forced wisdom that have been ingrained in their minds while they slept in their nursery beds. The conditioning, the separation of caste, and the routine distribution of a pacifying drug called soma (Huxley's magic narcotic), all work together to maintain order and a world that is completely void of conflict. And that is the great conflict itself, of course, for what is life without pain and misery to serve as a reference point for happiness to be compared to? What natural order can exist without chaos?
One character, who appears early in the novel, Bernard Marx, throws a wrench into this clockwork of perfection. It is rumored that his fetus was mistakenly treated with alcohol, for he is short for his caste and is prone to withdraw from society. His search for himself leads Marx to a reservation in New Mexico where he meets a young English man, raised in a Native American settlement, whose mother was accidentally left behind and shortly after gave birth. John, who is commonly referred to as "the savage" or Mr. Savage (to those wishing to address him formally), returns with Marx to the civilization he has never known and quite appropriately finds it to be the most appalling and unnatural environment imaginable.
The counterpoint between the three main forces (John, the savage, Bernard the maladjusted and disillusioned upperclassman, and the greater society of drug-induced contentment), accentuate the themes of loneliness, abandonment, and the struggle to find meaning in a life without conflict. This interplay culminates with a debate between John and the Resident World Controller for Western Europe that lasts for several chapters, after which the reader is left still begging the question...what is happiness if you are not allowed the freedom to be unhappy? And the few remaining chapters offer at least the possibility of resolving that conflict.
It is hard to say what is more remarkable, that Huxley's forecasts of a Nazi-like utopian future are seemingly foreshadowed by our own advances in technology and science, or that the themes of humanity versus machines, nature versus control and order, are still so relevant, if not more so, in our modern lives. Brave New World is still a potent commentary. Life is an experience, one that is enriched by conflict, but hindered by it at the same time. We can feel isolated by society, but rarely from it. The timelessness of these truths will never escape us nor will the impact of what is commonly referred to Aldous Huxley's greatest work, which remains as surprisingly relevant today as it was 70 years ago.
Rating:
Summary: this book was really bad!
Review: OMG! THIS BOOK [IS BAD]! wow, i think the author was on his on somas when he wrote this cuz it jumped from one thing to another and it really sucked it up! never read it, its the worst book i have ever EVER read! ERR!...
Rating: 
Summary: Unsucesfull mixture
Review: PIcture the time of Great Crisis in 1929. when Wall Street market fell. Picture the shockwave whose backlash was felt in whole Europe (which was, Engleand especially, economical "addicted" to America), and you have got a picture of the world that Aldous Huxley have had in mind when he was writing this book. What appeared in those days to be a end of the civilization as we now it, was a frightening posibility. Brave new world is reaction to the crisis of 1929. But, that was not the solemn Huxley's goal. Huxley despised "American dream" and way of life, way, of whom he thought, as a mixture of constant happines, and the most materialize step towards Utopia. So Brave new world could be viewed as a critique to US. Torn beetween wish to create a parody of american life, and creating of a possible, totalitarist, frightenig world, Huxley often mixed the two parts which resulted in chaotic thoughts and actions of main characters.
Rating:
Summary: Oh so overrated
Review: Try as I might, I just don't get the appeal of the Utopia/Dystopia genre. With it's idealistic philosophies and overdrawn characters, it leaves much to be desired by the realist. This book, who's plot is well known enough that I do not think I need to delve into it here, is very indicative of the whole genre. All of the characters are cardboard cutouts of the denziens of the utopian novel. There's the bewildered outsider, there's the one who can't accept the system, there's the one who accepts it whole heartedly, there's the victim of said society, etc, etc, etc. Yes, the book does raise important objections to the Totalitarian state and religious fidelity to science, however, these are actually fairly common objections that you do not need to read a 250 page book to figure out. If you loved 1984, give it a shot I guess. Otherwise, just read some critiques of Communist(and to a lesser extent, state capitalist) ideology.
Rating:
Summary: A Clarification
Review: I read this book when I was 15 (and have repeatedly read it since) and it is one of the books that shaped my world. I find it scary to re-read it now and see how many of the attitudes shown in the book are prevelant in our society today. This is one of the books I suggest that everyone read at least once. By the way, the end of the book wasn't the Savage walking on the stairs as has been said in other reviews. It was instead... (if you want to know, contact me at AOLIM: diaryxfairy)
|
