The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage
by George Orwell
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Book Summary Information
Author: George OrwellEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1961-03-08
ISBN: 0156701766
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage
Book Review: A Moveable Feast
Summary: 5 Stars
The blurb on the back of the book calls THE GEORGE ORWELL READER "a feast of reading for the thinking person." It is. For years this book was virtually my Bible, occupying a permenent place on the nightstand and accompanying me on every long trip, until it assumed its present, scribbled on, food-stained, dog-eared appearance.
Orwell has been called "the conscience of his generation", but more than that, he possessed an intellectual honesty which is utterly extinct among today's political writers - all of them, Left and Right, are either blinkered, ivory-tower idealogues, rabble-rousing demogogues or line-toeing party hacks. Whether you agree with Orwell's own political views (often, I don't) is immaterial; his ability divine and expose hidden motives, to sniff out hypocrisy, and to call a spade a spade and then use it to slice open those who refused to do so, are simply unmatched. Seldom if ever since Johnathan Swift has anyone written with such an utter disregard for tact, diplomacity, or political orthodoxy. A die-hard Socialist who was shot fighting with a quasi-Marxist militia during the Spanish Civil War, Orwell actually spent at least three-quarters of his intellectual life scourging and ridiculing Leftism and Leftists (those who "got their crockery from Paris and their political opinions from Moscow"), not out of self-sabotage, but because he hated cant, lying and cruelty and found a surplus of these traits on his own side of the isle.
The READER combines all three types of Orwell's work, including a sampling of some of his best essays and reportage ("Shooting An Elephant", "Second Thoughts on James Burnham", "Politics and the English Language", "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool", etc.), and lengthly excerpts from his novels BURMESE DAYS, A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER, COMING UP FOR AIR, KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING, and 1984, his nonfiction works THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER, DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON and HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, and the seminal essay "The Lion and the Unicorn." For Orwell fans, it's a sort-of "greatest hits" album, and for strangers to his work, it works a terrific primer, providing a very diverse and wide-ranging sample of his thoughts.
There will probably never be another Orwell: humanity has marched too far down the road of blind party loyalty, one-issue voting and material selfishness to produce one. But thanks to books like this, there is no need for a replacement. Whenever we feel ourselves getting too complacent, too stupid or too hypocrtical, Georgie boy and his trusty literary spade will be there to stab us in the arse.
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