Animal Farm
by George Orwell
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Book Summary Information
Author: George OrwellPreface: Russell Baker
Edition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-04-01
ISBN: 0451526341
Number of pages: 140
Publisher: Signet Classics
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780451526342
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Animal Farm
Book Review: "All Animals Are Equal But Some Are More Equal Than Others"
Summary: 5 Stars
This novel is a sheer delight! I love the layers here, the story that is simultaneously a fable, a fairy tale, a fantasy, a satire, AND, of course, a stark morality play that denounces the evils of Soviet Communism, which in Orwell's lifetime had sold out the Socialist dream he once embraced and on that foundation of betrayal enslaved an eighth of humankind.
Orwell's great joke on the world is a classic for all time. In Animal Farm, the slightly paranoid man who died confident history would vindicate the fears that made him author 1984, gives us a short, rapidly-moving piece about a collection of farm animals who rise up under the inspiration of a Marx-like barnyard prophet, an aged pig named Comrade Napoleon, and overthrow the Czar-esque farmer who has tyrannically ruled over them for decades. The gleeful animals establish a utopian community in which "all animals are equal" and "four legs good, two legs bad." They allocate resources according to need and divide labor according to ability, and then set about enjoying this casteless paradise. At first things work well, with all beings enjoying fairness and egalitarian ideals in action. The animal join to resist an invasion from humans who try to re-establish the reign of the farmer, and then return to their dream existence among the green pastures and well-tended barnyards.
But then, as in real life in this thinly-veiled mirroring of the early USSR, things change. The pigs, kin to the great prophet Comrade Napoleon, begin to emerge as a ruling elite. Even while they still proclaim to live by the ideals of the glorious revolution, these animals centralize authority more and more. There is a power struggle between two pigs, with one, the Stalin -like Comrade Snowball, rising supreme with the aid of the vicious barnyard dogs, who work exclusively for him. "Comrade Snowball is always right" becomes one the new phrases under which the animals must live and "all animals are equal" is eventually altered to "all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."
Before the conclusion of this imaginative masterpiece, the pigs are driving cars, meeting with farmers who live outside the working beasts' paradise, and after their cruel betrayal of the working class (symbolized by a horse named Boxer) the pigs are last seen wearing clothes and WALKING ON TWO LEGS, the final symbol that these one-time idealists have utterly abandoned their revolutionary rhetoric and become tyrants far beyond the scope of the farmer who once ruled the land.
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