1984

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Summary: High School Students - Write!
Review: Though I graduated from high school a long, long time ago, I would like to encourage any young people to speak their minds about this (or any other) book. The snotty exhortation below: "If you just finished reading 1984 for your high school English class, PLEASE do not write a review" is rubbish. Don't be fooled by the "college" bit. Your opinions now are as good as anyone else's, and a higher education is no guarantee of wisdom. As for Orwell, I recommend "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" more highly than "1984". But if you must read something dreary, Kafka is more profound and more imaginative (in my opinion).

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Summary: We have always been at war with Eastasia...
Review: Like most kids, I was forced to read 1984 in high school. Like other books I was forced to read, I was predisposed to dislike it. Compelled reading is rarely fun - especially when the book has a "message." Coming back to 1984 all these years later, I am struck not only by how spot-on Orwell is in his analysis of human society, but what a good read the book is in its own right.

There is a tendency to be snobbish in literature. 1984 CAN'T be a science fiction book because science fiction books are trash. 1984 is not trash, therefore it is not science fiction. This is Orwell's principal of "doublethink" in action. Not only is 1984 science fiction, it is the best dystopian novel ever written (I would place Fahrenheit 451 in second place - something about books with numbers in the title). Orwell vividly creates a nightmare vision of the future more realistic than anything we've seen before. The future in London does not look advanced because technology has stopped. The telescreens are the only omnipresent gadget. Instead London looks like what it is - a destroyed Victorian England.

It is hard to come to 1984 fresh because so many of the terms Orwell invents have become iconic: Big Brother (is watching you), Three Minutes Hate, Doublethink, Newspeak, Thoughtcrime, The Thought Police, and Room 101. I won't go so far as to say that 1984 is coming true - in many ways, humanity is going in the opposite direction - but it is unsettling how many things are coming true. Are there not TV screens everywhere and don't they watch us as much as we watch them. Revisionist historians are all around and, as the Party says, "who controls the present, controls the past." Is modern politics possible at all without Newspeak and Doublethink? In Iraq, until recently, it was the face of Sadam Hussein that was everywhere watching everyone and that face bears a remarkable resemblance to Big Brother.

It's easy to equate the Party in 1984 with our current government, but I think that is a bit too simplistic. What makes Orwell more than merely a liberal is his pessimism about everyone. "The only reason for power is power." It doesn't matter who is in control - it is all doublethink. What makes 1984 truly great is that we are not given a happy ending. Orwell is not a humanist - humanity doesn't stand a chance against the Party. Instead, our vision of the future is "a boot stepping on a human face-forever."

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Summary: Wow...
Review: 1984 is just one of those books I've always wanted to read. Although I had never heard anybody talk about it for long, or anything other than the phraes "Big Brother is Watching You," the fact that I heard it referred to everywhere as a good book. While browsing at Barnes & Noble, I saw it and decided to pick it up and, suffice to say, I'm glad I did.

Orwell's use of character development in 1984 is on par with the astounding work done in Animal Farm. In a sense, you aren't just reading about Winston Smith, you ARE Winston Smith. Every thought, every nuance of his mind, is so clearly conveyed that you can't help but feel like you're there right along with him.

The negative utopia dreamed up by Orwell is astounding in both its shocking nature and it's beleivability. It's a world where everybody either has a government job or is an outcast. A world of a vast caste system that is all too beleivable. A world where the all-pervasive government can, for all intents and purposes, alter the past, the present, and reality itself. Their control over the minds of the citizens of Oceania is so great that they have no choice but to accept without question what the aprt says, or be eliminated.

Let me get one thing straight: This book is not a happy one. It displays a party who can and does shred every remain of human dignity. You will leave this book not with a sense of happiness, but with a sense of awe. The shocking tale held within the pages of this book is one of the finest peices of modern literature ever written. I'll leave it at that.

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Summary: What is it all about?
Review: Brandon Alspaugh's review is by far the most intelligent of all the reviews, but he really missed the point. In 1945, Orwell saw the signs of things to come. He was not a prophet in the sense of the Old Testament prophets but a man who could relate seemingly unrelated things, what we used to call prescient. 1984 was a year arbitrarily chosen. Of course, some things had come true by 1984, and others had not and never would. One big mistake Orwell made was to make Big Brother an appendage of the government. Alspaugh is exactly right that Big Brother is the media. He's a little skewed in leaving out the rest of the media and concentrating on Fox, but he has the idea. The chief notion of the book is embodied in the character of Winston Smith and his occupation, which is the rewriting of history. As an historian, I am vividly aware of how much history has been rewritten in the past half century by the revisionists. But we may yet escape the world of 1984. There is in the making a rebellion of the proles. They are beginning to object to the
manipulation of facts by the media. There are some things the proles know, and they will not accept alternative "facts." Odd, isn't it, that the folks who think for themselves these days are not the most educated class?

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Summary: Excellent anytime reading
Review: This book is absolutely amazing. I finshed reading it for the first time about amonth ago, and it really, truly caused me to actually think. Few books nowadays even can claim that. Orwell was a true visionary when he wrote this book. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a socialist, it just wouldn't surprise me if within the next 300 years it ends up like what Orwell said.

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Summary: a++++++
Review: there is a reason that this novel is still considered cutting-edge.

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Summary: The world to come
Review: 1984 is probably the best book out there. I cant believe how George Orwell comes up with this stuff. He desribes a world free form love, emotions, and privacy. His great use of charactres and plot makes the book a page-turner. I also believe that George is describing our wourld in the futre. If our civilization keeps doing what we are doing our would is going to end up like 1984.

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Summary: A Stunning Read!
Review: Of all of George Orwell's works, "1984" must rank as his most famous, most known and most read book - and with good reason too. It depicts a society under the iron grip of a totalitarian terror state, where the Thought Police are in control, and the population is held under the mystical will of "Big Brother", the unseen leader of the ruling party. Orwell's protagonist, Winston Smith, is incredibly unique in the sense that he enacts a rebellion, and demonstrates a small vestige of free thought that one believes has been completely eradicated by the Party.

As a lower-level propagandist in the Ministry of Truth, Winston is a participant in the very system that he believes himself to be rebelling against. His duties include disposing of unwanted, or potentially dangerous historical facts, and the alteration of past newspaper articles to suit the line of he Party. This can range from the amount of chocolate in the week's ration, to the wartime enemies of the state. Nothing in Winston's world, is what it seems. Orwell's masterful prose takes the reader through the progessive stages of Winston's "rebellion", from his writing of "Down with Big Brother" in his secretive diary, to his love affair with Julia, a co-worker at the Ministry of Truth - and a notorious philanderer (this however, is pleasing to Winston!)

Orwell makes excellent use of the contrasting themes of hope and despair to weave a complex tapestry of Oceania's political system. As it turns out, Winston's perceived success is a mere illusion, as he finds himself unable to trust any of his fellow citizens(the Thought Police are personified in a humble, ageing shopkeeper, who reveals himself upon having gained Winston's trust). The tragedy of Orwell's novel is that whatever hope is created by Winston's rebellious actions (such as his dissent in his diary, his affair with Julia, his enquiries about the past times) is countered by the overwhelming revelation that the omnipotence of the Party is unsurpassed. The reader could even conclude that Winston was lead from the nose by the very system he believed he was challenging.

The novel ends on a grim note, with Winston experiencing frightful torture in the chambers of the Ministry of Love, and reconditioned as yet another mindless, thoughtless and conforming pawn in the never-ending game played by the Party upon it's own people.

Orwell's tragic novel also had political relevance in reality. Written in 1948 (hence the title), Orwell was in fact writing a searing indictment of a totalitarian system that is the identical twin of that depicted in these pages - Stalinist Russia (Big Brother's description is a mirror image of Stalin). Stalin's reign of state-sanctioned terror, brutality and thuggery lasted from 1929 until his death in 1953, and during the Second World War (when the Soviet Union was the ally of Great Britain and the USA against Nazi Germany), Orwell was one of the few British political commentators who had the courage and will power to reveal the true nature of their so-called "ally". Through reading Orwell's masterpiece, one can draw a solid conclusion as to how life was in Stalin's terror state 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Orwell's most endearing work is testimony to the value of human liberty and why we should never let it be wrested from us.

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Summary: Of course it's not true...real stories never are
Review: I'm always struck by the dichotomous reactions to 1984. Some will claim its brilliantly written, others that it's horribly written. Some paint it as an attack on socialism, others as a brilliant satire of modern republican democracy. I find it utterly terrifying if only because its ideas run further into the fabric of our society than most people know; that because there are no posters for Ingsoc on the walls they assume there is not one stamped indelibly in their mind.

Or, to put the point lucidly, the horror of 1984 isn't the telescreens and rocket bombs, nor is it even the Thought Police. The horror is the idea, and the idea is still being fought against even today.

I suppose first of all I should consider the writing. It's fantastic. It's subtle. It's appropriate. From the very first sentence 'the clock struck thirteen' the reader is informed something is very *wrong* here. Clocks do not strike thirteen; they strike twelve. It's as common as green lights meaning go. From the very beginning an undercurrent of wrongness is present. Orwell also maintains the difficult proposition of keeping his writing limited to the point of view of Winston while at the same time trying to explain enough of his dystopia to make it plausible and whole.

Second, its 'point'. Well, despite the unfortunate name given, Ingsoc (or 'English Socialism') is no more proper socialism than it is facism, or republicanism. All three rely on a precariously perched ruling class and a shortage of the necessities of life. Unfortunately too many were influenced by the satire of 'Animal Farm' and its seemingly obvious parallels to the Soviet Union (try this fun game; the old pig is not Lenin but Franklin. Snowball, rather than Trotsky, is Jefferson and his ideological children. Napoleon is not Stalin but Alexander Hamilton and his followers, most notably Andrew Jackson. Insert names as needed. The true genius of 'Animal Farm' is that its archetypes can be filled by the proper people/ideologies of almost any modern government.) This book isn't about the Soviet Union. The SU is, if anything, infinitely preferable.

Orwell is attempting to make the point (further explained in his essay 'Homage to Catalonia') that all government has that awful potential, and each is as likely to slide into totalitarianism as another. Those who say the book is an attack on communism are

a) woefully misinformed; the society depicted in 1984 bears little or no relation to communism or socialism beyond the communal obligation, and this obligation is not to one's fellow man as in proper socialism but to the state, and is then fascism or republican democracy if it is anything, and

b) naive if they believe that the fall of the Soviet Union makes the book's ideas irrelevant. Orwell observed more than once that no government is inherently 'better' than any other. Anyone who says of communism "Well, it failed in the Soviet Union, didn't it? That proves it didn't work!" might well look towards Athens, Rome, France, Germany, and countless other countries where democracy failed even more spectacularly. Any government can fail at any time in any place given the proper conditions. Democracy can collapse. Monarchs can be overthrown. Fascists can be defeated. Communists can be glasnosted out of existence. Orwell observes the Marxist idea that a distribution of wealth, even if still geared towards the wealthiest one percent, would still proportionately increase the standard of living of the average person to the point where they would realize the Highs are superflous appendages, the appendices and vestigial lower ribs of the social body.

Totalitarianism, Orwell argues, exists at the core of all governments and, despite the best intentions of its rulers, a government is almost a living entity in and of itself, and will naturally seek to aggregate as much power to itself as possible. Whether one is ruled by an absolute monarch or a representative body this tendency remains.

It's even more frightening today to watch any segment of Fox News and see the Two Minutes Hate so perfectly realized, the remnants of the New Deal and Great Society carved into pieces and served to the military for a war which cannot be won because it cannot be fought with weapons. When raw sewage leaking into groundwater can be reclassified as 'compost' and the elimination of protocols for greenhouse gas emissions can be called the 'Clear Skies Act,' doublethink becomes as common to us as it is to this dystopia.

If anything, Orwell foretold the war of ideologies which more than anything has typified the twentieth and twenty-first centuries thusfar. The war his Winston Smith fights is not a war of guns and bombs; how can you kill an idea, whether it is the invincible Party or religious fundamentalism? The very nature of an idea is infectious, and when attacked will only strengthen the idea. Kill a believer and two more take his place, hydra-like. One could not destroy the Party by killing its members any more than one stops terrorism by killing terrorists. The idea is the root; the believers are only its twigs and branches.

To those who were forced to read this book for school: god forbid. I'm sorry you were forced into something which is the solemn obligation of any citizen, that to be informed and as educated as possible. It is the implicit guarantee of any democracy or socialist state that one's fellow man (or woman) is dedicated to making the most of themselves, not vegging out wringing their hands over American Idol. If it is painful or sophomoric to you it is because you are painfully sophomoric yourself, and have as little right to your freedom as the air you breathe (which is what brings about dystopia more surely than anything, the willful, arrogant ignorance of the people.) Not only do you not know, you don't care you don't know. Ignorance is worn like a badge of honor, and if totalitarianism comes I can hardly say you do not deserve every agony of it.

It is a book not only of but about ideas, and its only optimism is given in Orwell's comments on human nature; that a human naturally rebels against such a state, and even if it take a thousand years will destroy it, even if it is only to repeat the mistake again for another thousand. But in those moments between the terrible millenia are the small spaces allowed for such things as simple human kindness and decency, which is the surest remedy to totalitarianism as anything. When humans cease to be competitors for the material they find an almost limitless capacity for mutual understanding.

Anyone interested in other dystopia would be advised to read Zamyatin's 'We', 'A Canticle for Leibowitz', and perhaps the best of all if only for its brutal insight and simplicity, Platonov's 'The Foundation Pit'.

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Summary: 19-eighty four (opinion)
Review: My name is Kevin Olson I am a senior at walla walla high school and I recently read the book 1984, I really enjoy most science fiction books, but in 1984 I had complaints about the fact that I felt like i was outside looking down on the characters instead ofbeing along side of them during the different ordeals through out the story. the mood generally seemed hopeless in both the beginning and the ending. I think that it was like a movie with a very bad ending. so if you want to watch a movie thats based on this book, but has a better ending then go ahead and watch the movie equilibrium.