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Summary: Thank our lucky stars government isn't like that...yet.
Review: Orwell creates a frightening picture of how easy it is to manipulate human minds using extreme nationalism, unification from a common enemy, misplaced love, and the love of hating things. Readers ask themselves "WHY? Why do these people let themselves be subjected to such mind control?" Really it's all the people know. Somehow to them it makes perfect sense that the past doesn't exist. Scary. One of the best books I've ever read
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Summary: Early Perspective - take warning
Review: 1984-A good example of what government can and may do. Good warnings of what may happen when government is given too much power and how it may completely take over without being noticed. Depressing but gives good insight. READ IT!!
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Summary: Warning, be in a healthy frame of mind before reading this.
Review: This is a book which will haunt you all your life. It's a powerful tale of just how far tyrany can go. The impact of the book derives from the believability of the story and it's characters. I believe this work will survive as one of the great classics of our century. I do however warn any reader to be sure they are prepared to literally "walk through the valley of the shadow of death". Orwell paints a future so totally evil that it takes one some time to recover
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Summary: "Think of a boot stamping on a human face, forever....."
Review: It is difficult to put in words the power that Orwell's 1984 holds without the grave risk of understating. Orwell offers us a negative Utopia, a world where evil thrives and the word "Communism" is never actually uttered, for the simple reason that it does not need to be...he offers us Winston Smith, a tortured man who's struggle for his own thoughts, ideas, and lover is doomed to failure from the beginnning. The undertones of hopelessness, poverty, evil, and senselessness are ever present in this terrifying novel that I believe will outlive us all. One can only wonder why this novel was not put on the blacklist of Joseph McCarthy, who dubbed so many classics as "Unamerican". Many have found themselves profoundly depressed upon reading the last four words of this novel, which is every free thinking, open minded man's worst nightmare staring back from a page..
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Summary: 1984: It should outsell the Bible
Review: Most everyday at school, I am assigned reading. It never crossed my mind that a book with such power and meaning, 1984, could be read in a parochial school. I read it as a Sophomore last year, and now, as a Junior, am able to now fully understand the book and its tribulations.
Orwell is the master teacher, and we should consider ourselves to be mere pupils, desiring to learn the craft of excavating the truth.
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Summary: Big Brother is watching.
Review: Through out the centuries, men have preached altuism and unity. They were Big Brother. Through out the centuries, men have preached equality and hipocrosy. They were Big Brother. Through out the centuries, men have preached non-thought and conformity. They were Big Brother. Through out history, a long line of men have stood, begining with Plato, continuing with Stalin, and propagated today by every man, woman, and child who believes that 2+2=5, that A is not A. These men have stood for Big Brother, have stood for Ingsoc, have stood for evil, and have stood for 1984. George Orwell's masterpiece stood for all that which conflicted with those ideals: for love, for happiness, for individualism, for ego. On the surface, Orwell paints a picture more sickening, and more chilling to any person who believes that they are, that they are not a group, not a consortium, but exist in and for their own right. This is not a Utopia; this is what could happen, not what has happened. It is a testament to those who will not take the easy way out, will not conform. It is instead a tribute to those who rage against the dying of the light, for those who think, and those who know that 1984 can be stopped, by those who have stopped it through out the centuries: those who will not sanctify the punishment of virtue. The hero of this book is not Winston; it is the old prole' hanging out laundry, and making the song written by a machine a thing of beauty. In the end, the proletariat must rise; for they are not the lowest class, but the highest. The party members consider themselves higher because they have force, and therefor, by their reckoning, power. But they do not; they have nothing; everything is the Party's. But they are not the party; Big Brother is the Party. In the end, the Prole's are the powerful ones, for they know the beauty of reality, and of the of the simple phrase, "It is mine."
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Summary: simply terrifying...Big brother was awesome...
Review: I found 1984 simply terrifying. Big Brother was awesome and omnipotent: a televised god. Down to the very last detail of this all-encompassing nightmare society, George Orwell had me captivated
and fearfull; afraid to look closely at the workings of our own government and wondering at the vast differences we are told lie between the words insanity and conformity. 1984 showed the harsh realities that come to play in a society that
banishes the individual and rules with the mingled emotions of love, hate, and fear and the willfull acceptance for one to beleive in anything Big Brother says, in other words, that war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, two and two make five, and God is power.
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Summary: Defiance- 2+2=?
Review: This book is a deep representation of the human mind in comparison to the mind of the world and society. If a single man feels one way, that is the way he feels. Even though his ideas may be different than what is normal, they are still his thoughts. Winston Smith is a man struggling between the past and the future and lost in the present. The Thought Police along with Big Brother make the laws, rules, theories, past, present and future, and all that is. Life in 1984 is Big Brother. When Winston falls in love with a woman named Julia, a forbidden act, he becomes hopeful in his efforts to defy Big Brother. The force of it's power and strength is too strong and over powering, and Winston is crushed. Winston is a grain of sand on a beach owned by Big Brother. One grain, in the world of 1984, cannot rule the beach. The beach, by definition, is all the grains of sand. Without each grain, the beach would cease to exist. Without the followers, The Party would die. The will for it to survive is to powerful to allow it to fall and die
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Summary: "Hope" may be a wrong concept.
Review: I wonder, does a person have be seriously ill to write such a powerful book like Orwell did... He had no hope and he imagined all world in his situation. That's very interesting
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Summary: This is not a nightmare,this is the truth
Review: I lived almost whole my life in the system like this.In Czechoslovakia it was not the worst,but there was no light at the end of the tunnel.And it could hepped to all of us with a little help from our Big Brother on the East.We are lucky,but this book have to be in every school.We were so close to the hell...now we are free again.Thank you Mr.Orwell
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