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Title: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley ISBN: 0-06-092987-1 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (540 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A gram of soma a day...
Comment: Soma, feelies, scent organs...these are some of the wondrous inventions which litter the landscape of Huxley's ultra-happy dystopia. From the opening scene where we watch babies being farmed instead of born this book creates a world where science and logic have wiped out individual inspiration and such petty things as love, poetry and Shakespeare. This novel is a terrific read for it's ability to create a horrible world, and yet make it seem not so bad. This is the real power of the book. While the world of 1984 is obviously a nightmare, the world of Brave New World does not seem that bad for the most part. It draws you in and makes you wonder what a movie would be like where you can feel what the actors are feeling, or what work would be like if it was always perfectly challenging and stimulating. It creates a world that you know you are not supposed to like, but which is seductive none-the-less. And this sets up the final scene in which three men argue the fate of all our lives. In which art makes a stand against easy happiness, in which love makes a stand against ignorant bliss. The last twenty pages are a tour-de-force of philosophical inquiries which makes you realize that even though you could be happy in Huxley's Brave New World, you would never be yourself. And that is the only true happiness there is.
Rating: 5
Summary: In age of MTV, B Spears & Prozac, potent as ever
Comment: I've read in several places that BNW is somewhat trumped by 1984, which is absolutely true in sales terms and popularity today, in poignancy, and to a lesser extent by 'Clockwork Orange' also. One must concede that Orwell's and Burgess' works are much, much stronger as literary works, as BNW is essentially Huxley expounding on his political views of what he saw for the future in a very stripped-down fashion with a thread-bare plot and little character development. Despite this, I was enthralled with the book, and would posit that it blows away 1984 not as a work of literature, but certainly as a work of poignancy in today's world.
Huxley's main thesis is essentially that of the idea of happiness in slavery, of the new totalitarianism- its main tenets centering around frequent, meaningless sex, which is part of the non-existence of the nuclear family, babies being born in factories and indoctrinated from birth into the govt's class categories, constant use of soma if one starts to feel down, and the stifling of all dissent first by ridicule or just ignoring the dissenters, then finally arrest by the political police.
But it is the very idea of happiness, of freedom, which is an overriding concept here. The people are very happy in their enslavement to the government- they enjoy sex, who doesn't?, and immediately stifle all bad feelings with Prozac-like drugs. They are too busy to mess around with political activism or dissent because they are so content and numbed with their lives- sound familiar? In an age where something like one-third of the adult US pop. is on antidepressants, and where Abercrombie can market thongs for 8-13 year-old girls, is all so reminescent of the John Lennon- Marilyn Manson song "Working Class Hero": "They keep you doped with your religion, sex and TV; you think you're so clever and classless and free; But you're still [...] peasants as far as I can see." It is this idea that Huxley nailed on the head, in 1932, and which I think 1984 somewhat misses (of course I think Orwell was partly distracted by the thuggish nature of Stalinism, his brilliant analysis of the misuse of language aside). Big Brother is important, and growing more important with the Patriot Acts today, but the government would much prefer everybody to revel in their slavery, think they're free and wonderful participants in this brave new world rather than have any fear of the government coming to get them.
Huxley's 1946 forward to this edition is also very interesting, in that he reveals that he was trying to predict the future, but he was predicting several hundred years in the future in rather flagrant fashion, which shocked many critics of his era, but he can now (in 46) see that this is the very near future. To me, a fun, light read, again, no literary masterpiece, but a devestatingly poignant, powerful work 70 years after the fact.
Rating: 4
Summary: One of the top three
Comment: This is one of the top three books on my list that we've recently read in school. The other two were "Of Mice and Men," by Steinbeck, and Jackson McCrae's "The Bark of the Dogwood." All three were excellent, but Huxley's "Brave New World" just blew me away. My only dislike of the book was the overuse of the "Oh, Ford," idea as a joke. It wore thin after the first seven hundred times. Other than that, the book was great food for thought. Imagine how ahead of its time it must have been all those years ago!
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Title: 1984 by George Orwell, Erich Fromm ISBN: 0451524934 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: May, 1990 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: Animal Farm by George Orwell, C. M. Woodhouse, Russell Baker ISBN: 0451526341 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: 06 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger ISBN: 0316769487 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: 01 May, 1991 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut ISBN: 0440180295 Publisher: Dell Publishing Pub. Date: 03 November, 1991 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
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Title: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess ISBN: 0393312836 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: November, 1986 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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