Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Brave New World
Book Review: Exceptional buying experience
Summary: 5 Stars
ATTENTION:If you want to buy from an exceptional seller, look no further! This gentleman went above and beyond. I ordererd one of his books and didnt realize i neglected to choose express delivery (my daughter needed ASAP for school) I sent him an email and to make his customer happy, had an additional copy expressed from another state at no cost to me. I chose to donate the extra copy to the high school english department in his name, I hope he doesnt mind! Again, if you want to deal with an exeptional seller and person,look no further!Book Review: Experienceing Scifi for the nerd in you
Summary: 5 Stars
Brave New World is an excellent choice for anyone who likes to geek out on their English major status. The references to Shakespeare are well used in the text and make it one of those little gems that keeps you looking for more. On the scifi nerd front, the futurismic world of happiness at the cost of intellect is one of those ideas that gets repeated often enough, but that is only because so many people love to pilfer from Huxley. I really enjoyed Brave New World, even if there were a few philosophical points on which I disagree with Huxley (particularly the false dichotomy he expects the reader to blindly accept). As a dystopian writer Huxley is rightly placed with the greats like Orwell and Zamyatin.
Oh yeah, and Leonard Nimoy was great in this movie, they should make it into a book.
Book Review: Flawed Masterpiece
Summary: 4 Stars
It's no exaggeration to say that "Brave New World" is one of the most significant books of the twentieth century. Its social criticism is keen, its prophecies are shockingly accurate, and its theme of restless humanity struggling under the bonds of oppression is a timeless one. Other reviews will tell you much the same: this book deserves to be read by everyone living under Western civilization, and reread several times.
I say all this, however, with one major reservation - the story is lousy. To elaborate: The first half of the book follows Bernard Marx, one of civilization's discontents, an outsider who smells something rotten at the core of this eugenic utopia. Halfway through the book he befriends John, a "noble savage" from a nature reservation who grew up without any modern technology. Bernard decides, as a sort of anthropological experiment, to bring his "savage" friend back to civilized London. But once he becomes keeper of the hottest attraction in town, Bernard's newfound popularity goes to his head, turning him into a shallow, contemptible jackass. The story abandons him to follow John the Savage, who takes to this Brave New World as a cat takes to water. He detests it, its lack of emotion and humanity, and boils with such moral indignation that he's finally driven to, shall we say, desperate measures. But I'll say no more: no plot spoilers here.
Huxley begins with a fascinating premise, but its execution is flawed. This reader, for one, didn't know where to lay his sympathies: Huxley discards Bernard once he has the Savage to play with, and soon even the Savage becomes into a mere receptacle for Huxley's own moral outrage. Other characters begin to show the glimmer of redeeming qualities, but nothing ever comes of them. A didactic tone prevails throughout the novel, and the most important confrontations read more like philosophical dissertations than dramatic scenes. It's obvious early on that Huxley is more preoccupied with his ideas than his characters, and his fiction suffers for it.
But these shortcomings are purely aesthetic (and to Huxley's credit, he confesses to them early in the Preface). Huxley may not have been a brilliant storyteller, but he was a brilliant man of ideas. That's why I cannot recommend highly enough the companion volume to this work, "Brave New World Revisited," a series of essays Huxley wrote in 1958 to expand upon the social forces at work in the novel, particularly brainwashing and propaganda. (There's a paperback edition available on Amazon that contains both works.) Huxley is at his very best when he's writing nonfiction; he encapsulates whatever idea he's examining, anticipates the reader's questions and objections at every turn, and carefully lays out the implications of the idea. And these essays are especially remarkable, not only because the phenomena they describe are sublimely monstrous, but because these phenomena have, in great measure, come to be.
More so even than George Orwell's nightmare society, the bleak, inhuman future of Huxley's "Brave New World" seems to resemble our own world more with each new decade. That's why it's important to read and reread this book. Huxley has stood the test of time, if not as storyteller then as social prophet. His world is as original, terrifying, and prescient as it was when he conceived it.
Book Review: Funny and scary at the same time
Summary: 4 Stars
It's so weird that this novel was published in the 1930s because of the issues it brings up. It talks about issues like sex, reproduction, and religion in such a way that I was shocked that this book actually came out in the 1930s. The author was clearly thinking ahead of his time. It's both scary and funny at the same time because of how the rulers of this "brave new world" go about ordering their seemingly "perfect" society while at the same time praising all things "Ford". Definitely an interesting read.Book Review: Funny, Scary, Tragic, Unusual Future
Summary: 4 Stars
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is in many ways a paradoxical world: comically tragic, organized chaos, perfectly imperfect, a living and breathing oxymoron. There are several key players within the story--John (The Savage), Bernard Marx, Linda (John's mother), Lenina Crowe, Mustapha Mond, and Hermholz Watson. Much of the story is told from the point of view of Bernard, an Alpha male who is displeased with the structure of society and eventually talks Lenina into going to visit the "savage" society. While there, Bernard winds up meeting John, a "savage" who has many characteristics that make him a deep thinker and philosophical about man's existence. Bernard eventually talks John into making the trip to "civilized" London, an upside down utopia where babies and humans are "created", emotion is suppressed or avoided altogether, the collective is favored over the individual, and progress is stressed.
Huxley has an imaginative method of illustrating this new world. The topsy-turvy dystopia establishes that words such as "mother", "father" and "love" have no real use. Passion is ignored in favor of progression. Huxley comically and intentionally depicts "norms" of this shocking society. Without the basic idea of family or relationships between couples, people seem more like organisms than flesh and blood. Huxley perhaps was making a point about the times, maybe his society, maybe ours.
One of the more disturbing aspects to the world is the ideology of illusion serving to be the method for fixing one's problems or difficulties. Nearly all the characters escape from the world they live in by taking the hallucinogenic drug soma, designed to make them forget a troubling encounter or experience by travelling far away from the present. John, considered to be the "savage", is the only one willing to break from this practice while also actively trying to convince others of its wrongs. While others escape with soma, he escapes into reading Shakespeare, a form of therapy from this mad existence. Towards the end of the novel, John, while debating with Mustapha Mond (a Controller, vehemently tries to protest this "Brave New World" thinking: "Whether `tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing them...But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy." Soma seems to be a symbolic surrender, a post-modern easy button to life in the Brave New World. John's frustration with many of the people in this circle is that they are so brainwashed that they cannot even grasp his protests; he cannot convince them that there is another way to think. This is what eventually is John's undoing: he tries to seek refuge from this existence, this way of life, but there is no changing, no escaping, and no going back. Created in Huxley's work is an ironic confederation of idleness, the societal emptiness described eloquently by Mustapha Mond: "In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise."
If there was one element I didn't care for, it was the first part. While the first fifty pages or so set the scene for the new civilization, where the five castes of society are introduced and the background is set for the futuristic society, I found them to be a bit tedious. The novel really takes off when Part two begins, and we meet some of the aforementioned main characters. I only reveal this fact because some may lose patience in the beginning of their reading; if you stick with it, I think you'll be much more interested once the plot gets going.
This is a scary, original, and ironic ride into the future. Which future? That's for you to decide.