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Summary: An Omen?
Review: I read this book with the expectations that it was gonna make me think, and it did. The overall theme that of an oppresive society in the "future" was both thought-provoking and entertaining. People say that this book has no relevence today because of the fall of Hitler and Stalin, but I say it means more now than ever before. You just need to think of it in the opposite context. Let me explain. Today, we have a wealth of information, some say too much. That is the point. Since we as people have so much at our fingertips, it gets pretty easy for most to spend all day looking at meaningless junk and buying things that they don't need. There is where an oppressive gov't takes over by giving us freedom to look and buy, they take away our freedom of privacy, freedom of speech, and freedom of expression. And that is why this book is so important today, because we may be on the brink of a "1984" ourselves.
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Summary: Great book with a deeper meaning.
Review: Yes, this book is simple to understand by anyone. You do not need to be a philosopher or literature student. This book illustrates Orwell's vision of what would happen if humanity saught a utopian society. This is a book not of the pleasure and perfection we usually think about with utopian literature. It is the anti-utopia. This book will allow you to see humanity in it's true light. Orwell uses the ideals of 'the party', 'big brother' or a governmental power to illustrate his point on socialism. What ever Orwells means are, the fact remains that we can replace his governmental control with that of any particular group, and their need for complete power. It is the great agenda conspiracy. He makes his point. What I gather from the deeper meaning of this book is that humanity has an agenda. To gain power and create the world they wish it to be. Power is to be a God. This is the type of book that can be stripped down and analzyed page by page philosophically. The book is about a man named Winston. It is about his struggles to survive the world he exists in. A world where individuality, religion, unorthodoxy, love, compassion, and free thought are crimes punishable by torture and death. The party and big brother are all people in this world are to live for. They are not to live for themselves or their fellow humans. Hate is taught, war is life, the people are simply cogs in the party machine. They are worse than slaves, they are objects in the party's main goal...power.
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Summary: Brave New 1984
Review: There are only a few books that I believe should be on the required list for any student; this is one of them. 1984 represents the world that we most feared; it is a world where pain is synonymous with living, and illusion is synonymous with progress. This book is designed to scare everyone who reads it into imagining a world where there is no such thing as personal freedom, there is no private property, and the ability to love is a crime against society. Prior to the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990's, this was the staple vision of what we considered to be the future of Western Europe and Asia. It is this horrific vision of an all-comsuming and controlling State apparatus that keeps the reader thankful for what freedoms we do enjoy. Orwell elegantly argues that the true danger of the world is that people can be easily manipulated, controlled, and ultimately defeated in the struggle for individuality. Like its counterpart, Brave New World (by Huxley), Orwell creates a world in which individuality is not only lost, but humanity forgets that we ever had the capacity for it. Orwell masterfully describes every detail of this world, with the greatest care to the cold, and impersonal touch of opression. His arguments are both compelling and smattering of intense nuggets of rhetorical flavor; once you begin this book, you will not want to stop. Moreover, you will feel compelled to continue as you are drawn into the intense world of helplessness and despair that every fiber of your being will rage against. I urge any interested reader to dig into this book, and to finish it in one sitting if possible.
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Summary: Let's not pat ourselves on the back that this didn't happen.
Review: I had 1984 ruined for me because I was FORCED to read it for school. Looking back, it is a truly great book. Like many of the enduring works of Science Fiction, its lasting popularity rests in the powerful archetpyes and metaphors it tapps into. Big Brother, The Two-Minutes Hate, Room 101 are all here. What's scary is how some of this seems to be coming true - but Big Brother isn't so much the government as it is Corporations. Just try getting away from a viewscreen nowadays. Also, we watch the TV, but the TV also watches US. Advertisers, the Internet, and MTV control us more thoroughly than the Government could ever hope to espire to. Instead of telling us "We are at war with East Asia. We have ALWAYS been at war with East Asia!" they tell us what our values are, what music we listen to, what movies we watch, etc. "We listen to Britney Spears! We have ALWAYS listened to Britney Spears." Orwell would've been so proud.
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Summary: 1984 Is The King Of All Distopia Novels
Review: A powerful political statement... and a frightening glimse into a different world that might some day exist. 1984 is passed but the message grows stronger as it sinks farther into the past. You won't be able to put it down. As well written as Catcher In The Rye.
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Summary: Postcard to the Future
Review: Viewed one way, George Orwell's work reads like a quasi-biography. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a man trapped in a totalitarian society whose first major act of the novel is to begin a diary, so that people in the future can piece together what his present was like and what the past was like, too. That, of course, is exactly what Orwell was doing: writing this novel as a warning to future generations. Orwell was not, as one earlier viewer noted, ahead of his time. He was very much a man of his time. The world during the period preceding and contemporaneous with his work was afire with the sorts of totalitarianism - Nazism, Communism, well-intentioned but disastrous Keynsian socialism - descibed in this work. F.A. Hayek's book ("The Road to Serfdom") on the threat socialism was to basic human freedom, which may or may not have influenced this work, came out around the same time. Orwell makes it personal. And he reminds us, rightly & properly, to fear anyone who would bend and distort the truth for their own purposes. When others fear the truth WE have reason to fear THEIR motives. We have, of course, seen this recently: the college newspapers refusing to print an anti-reparations ad or the theft and destruction of conservative newspapers on college campuses. No one who genuinely believes in the validity of their argument need fear the effects of dissent: if wrong, it still helps them to clarify their argument; if right (presuming they care for the truth), it serves as a valuable course correction. Orwell's novel also serves to show the importance of organizations - civic groups, churches, even corporations - as a bulwark against government power. Without them, the government can quickly crush any individual it deems a threat. A lone voice in a large country is seldom heard. The freedom of assembly allows men to magnify their voices. In this novel there is nothing that stands between the government and its citizens. When the government is able to bend any group to its will (think of the lawsuits against the Boy Scouts or the Rotary Club), nothing stands in its way, and the end is truly near. Given the dreariness of the movie I was rather scared to pick up this famous novel - I was 12 when that red letter year came around, and I wholly remember the hype. But through the depressing storyline the personal struggle of Winston Smith shines through. And so does the storyline of mankind itself.
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Summary: Kick in face
Review: This book is a real kick in the face for anyone who has read it. Especially if you are in the middle of an instituition (prison or school...is there a difference) and have grown up hating beuracrats. Read this book, and burn down London to paraphrase Shaw.
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Summary: Interesting
Review: Interesting book. I first read it in 1984 and had a lot of fun picking out the items he got correct. I reread it recently and it is even more fun. The writing is not real uplifting, but all in all it is a good book. Everyone should read it.
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Summary: A Truly Canonical Literary Masterpiece
Review: Huxley's book was smart; Orwell's is intoxicatingly so. Huxley was before his time, but not only was Orwell before his time, he also managed to create a world so real and believable that it is almost as if all of this really took place in 1984. This book is obviously very important for so many different reasons. The book is extremely definitive, aptly describing every aspect of a self-sustaining totalitarian empire, and is as much a social essay as it is an engaging piece of fiction. The book has probably forever redefined the way that I look at government. I'm a very stubborn person, so the book for me is genuinely something special.
One of the things that struck me as being very impressive is how Orwell wraps up the whole thing. I think it shows a lot of intellectual maturity to write a book of this kind and not succumb to the literary desire to end the story happily. Had it been otherwise, the book would not have been nearly as important a work. Logically a society crafted around the ideal of oppressing the individual will never fall to a single person, and it speaks highly of Orwell that he did not sacrifice the theme to make the story more fulfilling for the reader. In fact, I think Orwell was trying to discomfort the reader in a way that they start looking more critically at the architecture that society comes from. This is one of the things that makes a book historically important, and is one of the reasons that 1984 had such a deep impact on me.
On the topic of Oceania and the Party, it is very important that they separate themselves from all preceding governments because they do not exist under the pretense of any false concern, such as the well-being of the populace or economic stability; instead they exist only for the sake of gaining power. This important distinction is probably the main reason that their society is more likely to survive for forever than any totalitarian government that came before it. Societies fall when the people become discontented. If you prevent the people from being discontented through brainwashing or getting rid of the people who are immune to brainwashing, there is no threat, no matter how bad the society really is.
Of course, the ideas relating to modifying history are equally profound. The quote, 'Those who control the past control the future. Those who control the present control the past,' is likely to stick with me for the rest of my life. The idea of controlling a source document and changing it's content whenever necessary is even more relevant now that we live in a society where all definitive editions of information exist in a freely modifiable, digital format. Newspeak is also a very interesting thought in and of itself. Part of the reason that Winston was such a threat to the Party was because he was so deeply rooted in English, the language of poetry, because it comprises the words (and therefore thoughts and ideals) of most of the major peoples of the world. Newspeak removed this potential for the expression of emotion.
In short, 1984 is thought provoking and brilliant. It is a book that anyone with any potential to grasp its meaning should read, and absolutely deserves a position as one of the most important works of literature in modern times.
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Summary: Much better than "Brave New World"
Review: Although Brave New World has been written before Orwell's masterpiece - which is the great merit of Aldous Huxley - and these books show different views of the future, I consider 1984 much more mature than the other. When I started to read it, I couldn't stop. It's intelligent, interesting and VERY well written. Besides, it deals with many, many issues, not only totalitarism, as people use to say. It deals also with loneliness, mass media and the power of verbal language. I really like Orwell's description of a profesional "building" a new language, a language so limited that would control human's thought. George Orwell was very inspired when he wrote this book. Congratulations to this sensitive writer.
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