Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Brave New World
Book Review: Brave New World
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is a classic and for very good reason. It has some powerful themes and is written in such a gripping way that you can't put the book down until you've finished. It doesn't have the darker, totalitarian, hyper-surveillance overtones of Orwells '1984', but gives an equally disturbing view of the future. The ideas of social conditioning and recreational drugs are especially chilling and makes you look at the world around you in a whole new light. I found the ending a touch lack lustre (hence the four stars), but the journey getting there is marvelous and will make you uncomfortable at times as you consider what life you'd prefer, the drugged easy utopia ,or the feeling savage lands. I guess that's a debate that we ask ourselves spiritually or in our everyday lives to some degree anyway, (simply getting by or feeling deeply and rocking the boat). This book is just an amplification of that. Overall a great read, with stirring themes that will play on your mind for some time to come and well worth the time taken to read it. One of those books that leaves your life richer for having read it.Book Review: Brave New World
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought Brave New World from Amazon.com from treebeardbooks and was very satisfied! The book was in good condition and I received it 3 days after ordering!Book Review: Brave New World not as deep at 1984.
Summary: 4 Stars
Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World presents a vision of consumerism and mechanization, where social strata are bred into the biology of factory-produced twins, and stuporous stability is the highest government ideal. I found myself captivated by the book's system of society, its veneration of Henry Ford, and culture of instant gratification. If Orwell's vision was pure fascism, this is pure capitalism.
On the downside, Brave New World is nowhere as intellectually deep as 1984. The plot and characters are underdeveloped and inconsequential. Huxley makes the joy of reading solely in its exploration of his (brave new) world, but that can only carry the book so far. Throw in a compelling plot, differentiated tone of story-telling, and dynamic characters and it might have been perfect.
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Book Review: Brave New World--a contrarian view
Summary: 4 Stars
Though easily his most famous book, Brave New World may also the least satisfactory for those readers who enjoyed Huxley's work from the first decades of the century--or at least it is less satisfactory reading for me. To wit, for others familiar with these earlier works, Brave New World may seem a bit heavy handed, a-literary, and more a compilation of typical Huxley themes than a continuation of the pleasing novels of the twenties and thirties. The writing and observations are without nuance, and with too large an intent to startle, stir and create paradox. There is the sense, in Brave New World, of the author being a skilled literary puppeteer entertaining and awing with his usual tricks. No doubt there are grabbing effects and counterintuitive speculations that might amaze and amuse the reader naive to Huxley's general cast of mind, but also a loss of the delicacy of Huxley's usual prose style. For those not familiar with Huxley, an example in another art form might illuminate: the song "I want to Hold Your Hand" was at the time the most popular Beatles song, full of interesting, crowd pleasing effects, but certainly not their best work, and geared to be popular amongst an American audience. In the same way, Brave New World seems an over-exaggerated display of some Huxleyen literary effects with his typical themes, and in some ways, seems less intelligent than previous more obscure works. The need to delve into scientific speculation, and the need to comment upon human society in a prescient way seems to have been a predisposition from the Matthew Arnold side of the family, as well as a white elephant burden from his predecessor, Thomas Huxley, Darwin's bulldog. Brave New World, though hailed as an important book, has the beginnings of some of his later, more idiosyncratic thinking such as the belief in the paranormal or ESP, where the pressures of iconoclasm and oppositionality to convention steered Huxley into erroneous, puzzling directions. In some ways, Brave New World is the summit of Huxley's career, in other ways, it is the beginning of the end. Damon LaBarbera, PhBook Review: Brave Old Book With Such Truth In It
Summary: 5 Stars
I had to read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley in my English 102 class. Excellent book! It was written in 1932, but is set a few hundred years into the future. Don't let its futuristic setting fool you, for it isn't a sci-fi novel. Instead, Brave New World explores the consequences of our consumer society, and the government's ability to distract the masses by keeping them happy and drugged. There is a lot of social satire that is very relevant to modern readers. You'll find yourself counting all the fictional predictions that came true. Brave New World is a short read, but I highly recommend it to anybody interested in good literature. It will make you think.