Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Fahrenheit 451
Book Review: **Holy Angels**
Summary: 4 Stars
When I first started reading this book in my Language Arts class, I honestly didn't like it at all. It was very complicated and confusing, but Ms. O., my teacher, helped explain the book. All of the metaphors and similes symbolized something. All of the symbolism in this book was so amazing once you understood it. Light and dark, symbolizing good and bad, was used often in Fahrenheit 451. I loved this book once I understood all of the symbolism. Fahrenheit 451 was written 50 years ago, but is supposed to take place in the 24th century. It's funny, because some things are reversed. The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman, but not the kind of fireman you're thinking of, a fireman in the future. They go around lighting peoples' houses on fire if they have books. You're not allowed to read in the future, because the government knows that books create curiosity and cause you to think. The future government doesn't want anyone to believe in anything else except what they want the society to believe. You have a speed minimum, and if you drive slower then the speed minimum, you get a ticket. The whole world just rushes from place to place. The government knows that if people don't rush around, it might give them time to think. No one talks to each other, and it seems as if no one loves each other. Teenagers kill each other for "fun." In some ways I see our society turning into this, and I probably wouldn't be very surprised if it was like this in the 24th century. It's just horrible to think that our world might turn into a mindless, hypnotized world. This book makes you think, and it makes you realize how wrong censorship is. It was written in 1953, and that's a little while after World War II, so Ray Bradbury, the author, probably got some of his inspiration to write this book from Hitler. If Hitler ended up winning World War II, I could DEFINATLY see our world turn into Ray Bradbury's "future world." Guy Montag's big internal conflict starts when he meets Clarisse, a crazy-17-year-old. She's different from everyone else, because her family talks to each other at night instead of watching TV. She asks Montag if he's happy, and that one question starts everything. He realizes that he isn't happy, and he becomes curious about books. There is no book like Fahrenheit 451. Its constant metaphors, similes, and symbolism cause you to think about things that you would never begin to think about. -->Gabby
**Holy Angels Class of '04!!!**
Book Review: *H*A*S*-->Fahrenheit 451 Book Review
Summary: 4 Stars
When we first started reading this book in class (8*4!!), I found it was a very interesting, complex book. Bradbury seemed to hold on to my attention through the whole book. I think that, after reading this book, everyone will have a new perspective on our current society. From reading about Montag's quest to find out the truth behind the illegal books and the weird laws of his generation's government, it taught me to appreciate what I have now, and to pray that our world will never come to the point where they want to ban books all together from their love to new technology and a faster, better, easier way of life. Reading this great piece of work makes you, just as Montag, question.... are these people really happy?!? You learn throughout the book that it is important be able to think on your own, rather than being a mindless person just sitting as a statue { :) trick} in front a TV, watching what the government wants you to watch, not what you want to watch. I learned a very valuable lesson from this book that I will cherish for the rest of my life.Book Review: 5 Stars
People say this book is no good just because it's too "confusing." Well, just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean that the book is bad. Dumbing down ideas doesn't make a book better. I understood this book quite well. I also love this Mr. Bradbury's imagination. If you liked this book, you should also read Dandolion Wine, another book by this great author. If you don't like this book because it's too confusing, just don't read it. It is a great book and seeing all those "1 star" reviews for being confusing is a real pitty.Book Review: ...the temperature at which books burn
Summary: 4 Stars
I have known about Fahrenheit 451 for many years, but never picked it up until recently when my daughter brought it home from the school library. She hadn't enjoyed it too much, she said, but some of her friends had. Bradbury, along with Isaac Asimov and a couple of other authors, is an icon of 20th century American science fiction, and this novel offers an excellent display of his prowess. The version I read, published by Ballantine Books, contains an interesting Afterword written by the author in 1982 (the book itself was written in 1953 at a UCLA typing room on typewriters 'which rented out at a dime a half hour'). In it, Bradbury describes the book's c. 1980 adaptation to the stage, in which he further developed certain key characters, namely Clarisse, the mysterious young girl who opens the main character's eyes, and Captain Beatty, the ironically well-read fire chief who is in charge of book burning. Bradbury also mentions changes added by Francois Truffaut, the Director of the film version (see Fahrenheit 451 for the DVD). Appropriately enough for a book about an extreme form of censorship, Bradbury notes that he has avoided the temptation to censor his own young self by bringing some of these additions into a revised version of the novel: "I don't believe in tampering with any young writer's material, especially when that young writer was once myself." A wise decision, judging from the excellence of the original product.Book Review: 24th Century version of RIF: "Reading is Flammable"
Summary: 5 Stars
Ray Bradbury's 1953 phantasmagoric blockbuster "Fahrenheit 451", written at the height of the fabulist's authorial powers, is a tale of a world gone mad, a topsy-turvy America in which black leather-clad firemen race laughing on their steely Salamanders on midnight alarms, not to quench fires but to start them.
The firemen of the nightmare world of "Fahrenheit 451", of which the novel's hero Guy Montag is a dedicated one, comprise an army turned against an enemy far more insidious than Flame: they mobilize against ideas, and turn their napalm hoses on the feeble paper on which those subversive ideas are printed, and on the vulnerable binding in which the paper is housed.
When I first read "Fahrenheit 451" nearly two decades ago, I felt beaten down, nauseated and fatigued. I believed then, and believe now, that it was the most scarily bleak and mercilessly depressing book I had ever read. Even then, I felt the cushion between Bradbury's 24th century nightmare and what we call modern reality was thin and worn.
Bradbury gave us until the 24th century to submerge ourselves in the dark, sedated, media-slaked night of "Fahrenheit 451." Looking around me, I have come to the conclusion that Bradbury was a pretty optimstic guy.
Like Orwell's "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" is a dystopian vision, a glimpse into a future America that is frighteningly familiar and yet horribly wrong. It is a technologically advanced, subtle, sophisticated world, full of high-definition television screens that take up an entire wall and beam 24 hour programming to a vacant and eager television audience, 24-hour Reality programming that serves up a TV "Family" more engaging, more lifelike, more agreeable, than their own.
This is a world where bored, vacuous housewives exchange barbs on the latest presidential contenders laced with observations on which candidate is the most handsome, and which has the most noticeable (to the Television Audience, naturally) facial bunion or boil. It is a world of 'seashells', tiny earphones designed to nest in the inner ear and breathe a sussurus of music into the mind of a medicated listener.
Like his English counterparts Huxley and Orwell, Bradbury has served up a soft tyrannical state manned, not by the zealous, but by zombies. It is a world ruled by the media-addicted, the apathetic, the listless, the medicated, the overdosed, the sleeping. Books have been banned, and consigned to the Flame, not because of a despotic regime, but by the common, courteous consensus of a modern democracy desperately eager not to give offense to anyone.
Sound familiar?
Much like "1984", "Fahrenheit 451" works because it drills down on an unlikely protagonist. Guy Montag, at least when we meet him, sincerely loves his job. His fellow firemen are not zealots or fascists, but simply pragmatic working men who enjoy what they do. There are unpleasant aspects to the work, naturally---among them the incineration of an old eccentric woman who prefer to die with her beloved books---but like most of "Fahrenheit 451"'s society, Montag prefers not to think about it. Take a pill, or better still take two---and don't call me in the morning. For Montag, truly, it is a 'pleasure to burn'.
Like most revolutionaries, though, Guy Montag is simmering from within; dissatisifed with his wife, whose stomach must be pumped on the very evening he returns from the euphoria of the Burn; dissatisifed with the apathetic society in which he lives; dissatisfied with a job which fails to give expression to the rebel soul that burns within, that impels him to challenge his wife's brazen, flippant friends.
There are three catalysts that propel Montag to rebellion: the girl Clarisse, whom he befriends; the immolation of the old woman at the Fire; and his own clandestine book collection.
"Fahrenheit 451" succeeds as both jeremiad and prophecy, true, but it also engages because Bradbury is a literary master: his spare, mechanical narrative of Montag's wife having her stomach pumped by two callous, dirty, jocular technicians practically breathes pure horror, and is one of the most soul-deadening passages I have ever read.
But "451" also succeeds because it is a mirror of our own increasingly apathetic, violent, media-saturated world: is it so hard to see ourselves in Montag's trackless, cookie-cutter suburban landscape where bookish teenage girls are run down beneath the wheels of speeding pranksters, themselves bored and looking for the cheap thrill of ultra-violence? Is it so hard to see ourselves in the avidity of the Television Audience, watching the panicked, doomed, frantic rictus face of the condemned man stalked by the mechanical Hound, the images of his death broadcast back by the electronic antennaes on the monster's back? Isn't that merely COPS or "Survivor" with a bite?
I've seen the Future, and it works. Because it is our world I see, our world upon us---for that reason, "Fahrenheit 451" is the most terrifying book I have ever read.
JSG