Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Fahrenheit 451
Book Review: Timely now that we're entering into the new dark ages...
Summary: 4 Stars
I don't want to think how many years ago I first read Fahrenheit 451, but it must've been around the same time (1966) that Truffault came out with his horrible cinematic version of the novel. I know this because I remember being unimpressed with both versions (although the movie may've soured me on the book).
Re-reading the novel now, I still don't think that it ranks up there with, say, Huxley's Brave New World. But it is an astoundingly prescient vision of the sort of society in which we live: one in which cultural memory and tradition is increasingly replaced by immediate kitsch, in which media is entertainment, reading is a dying practice, immediate gratification the norm, jadedness a perennial hazard, and never-ending war a reality. Social commentators such as Morris Berman and Susan Jacoby have argued for a kind of secular monkdom to try to preserve and pass on the tradition that's quickly sinking beneath the new dark age that's descending, and this isn't at all unlike the anonymous book-memorizing preservers in Fahrenheit 451's moribund society.
What does it mean when a culture loses its depth, its memory, its lineage? What does it mean when an entire society is unable, as the character Granger recommends to Montag, to "stuff [its] eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds" (p. 140) because it's far too occupied with commerce and kitsch? Bradbury's dystopia invites us to ask ourselves these sorts of questions. We ignore them at our peril.
Book Review: True Fiction
Summary: 4 Stars
True Fiction
Though this book [Faremhieght 451] is a piece science fiction, it relates in its own little ways to the way the world is today. I, for one, can see this world of ours turning into a world with the same basis and same ideals that make up this book Farenhieght 451; a world which trys to keep everyone happy and careless about everything to the point of making people seemingly mindless, and in the process of doing so they destroy everything that brings people feeling and a individual way of thinking. Farenhieght 451 is a must read for anyone who likes a good philosophical novel.
Book Review: Wonderful Book
Summary: 5 Stars
This was the first serious book I read as a teenager and it changed my life forever. I had no idea up till then how one human being could be so perceptive about what was going on around him and be able to describe it is such beauutiful prose as that used by Ray Bradbury. It made me seek out other books to where now at the age of 54, I have a substantial library. I hope this book never goes out of print, although I'm sure there's no fear of that in the near future.Book Review: Written in the basement of the UCLA library
Summary: 5 Stars
I do not want to tell much of the story, as the unfolding is part of the intrigue. However now that houses are fire proof the purpose of firemen is performing a service by burning books to maintain the happy social order.
Naturally one fireman goes awry after several emotional incidences from someone burning up with the books to a young neighbor with strange ways, which run counter to his carrier. This leads to all kinds of deviant things like reading. What are you doing now?
One big rift between the book and the movie [Fahrenheit 451 (1966) -- Oscar Werner, Julie Christie] is that in the movie the "written word" was completely removed (even from the credits); where as in the book the state was against was literature and not technical writing.
Books are just symbols of ideas that could have been on the screen also. There is deference between training and education. Among other reasons the book was a symbol of one mans superiority over another in a world of equals.
Fahrenheit 451
Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity by Ray Bradbury
Book Review: a great book of our time
Summary: 5 Stars
A science fiction thriller. A true masterpiece that will blow you away. Although it's a science fiction book, it has some frighening resemblances to our own world. I could easily see this world turning onto the thoughtless "utopia" described by Ray Bradbury.
The government tries to keep everyone happy in the process of no self thought and the burning of things that would cause debate and conflict, such as books. Now that houses are completely fireproof, the firemen no longer need to stop fires. Instead, the have a new job: to burn books.
I liked this book because it kept me wanting it to keep reading and reading to the end. It was even hard for me to go to sleep some nights I was reading it. All in all it was a great book about one of the "bad guys", a fireman, who stood up agains the grasp of a corrupt society.
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