1984: 75th Anniversary

One of the most important books of the 20th century.

This book is hands down one of my favorite books of all time and is truly the definition of a classic. The story can easily be applied to the world we live in today. Now as for this hardcover its just okay.. I noticed that there was a slight curvature to the front cover (picture attached), however it doesn't seem anything of concern for most part and is probably due to amazons warehouse workers being careless as usual with their handling of customers items (amazon please fix this ever growing issue) and not the result of the publisher. The dust cover is simple and gets the job done, I feel that a little more effort could have been put in for a classic such as this.. especially since its a 75th anniversary.. The paper used is nice and the words are printed clearly unlike the paperback.. which I will get to in a moment. The spacing between words makes it easy to read and is the perfect font size in my opinion. The paperback is seriously lacking in quality from pages having very faded text, poor paper choice, and very very bad binding. The pages started to separate from the binding after getting halfway through the book and was quite frustrating to see as I was incredibly careful with the book. So do yourself a favor and pay the extra for the hardcover.. you'll thank me later. Overall its a decent hardcover for the price but as always expect minor blemishes due to mishandling and disrespectful warehouse workers.

Time to read this book again If you haven’t read this book since you were required to read it in high school or college, many years or decades ago, it’s extremely worthwhile to read it again. Much has happened since you last read it. You’ve also changed you’re own perspective. I last read it in high school in 1974, but was recently motivated to read it again after reading Anne Applebaum’s fantastic book, Iron Curtain, which reconstructs, from the everyday-person’s point of view, how after WW II, the Soviet Union conquered Eastern Europe and wiped out civil society in Eastern Europe after conquering it. I’ve heard the phrase “dystopian world” used to describe this book, and I disagree. This book is a clear reaction to and comment on the Soviet takeover of it’s own country and especially Eastern Europe that was occurring while Orwell wrote. Orwell, who I just learned died young at age 46 years old, just a few years after the book came out in 1949, wrote this book in 1947 in the middle of that take over, and it is interesting to read it again, 75 years later, to hear Orwell’s thoughts on what was occurring, as it was occurring anew. As I am writing this in 2023, Russia is trying to wipe out Ukrainian culture, saying it never was a country, systematically bombing its museums and cultural buildings and television towers, forcing residents to use Russian money and passports, and forcing schools in Ukraine to only use the Russian language and Russian textbooks. The Wagner group story in Russian is being changed. In Russia there isn’t a television screen in everyone’s home, like a bathroom mirror, as depicted in the book, but, not too far off the mark, everyone is on the internet, and the Russian thought police certainly monitors what people type and post. I do have to say that for the last few hours of the book, I just waited to get it done with…the extended torture scenes where Orwell shows us how torturing Winston brainwashes him, the long appendix where the narrator goes over the 1984 dictionary, the idea of a permanent war with minimal true destruction as a way of controlling the population. I thought it was interesting that the book is premised on a nuclear war happening in the 1950’s, and the world being broken up into Russian, USA/British, and China spheres of influence—-actually not too far from where we are now, minus the nuclear war, assuming Ukraine doesn’t heat up. It is interesting that Russia has survived as a thought-controlling type of government. This was likely all new when Orwell wrote 1984 back in 1947. Lastly, as I am a lot more experienced compared with when I read this book in high school in 1974, I can now appreciate Orwell’s severe sarcasm. Orwell is not quite funny, but very frequently I found myself smirking and shaking my head. I did the audiobook, and Simon Prebble did well. As a parting thought, in our capitalist society our every thought is monitored by companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, and then sold and used to make money and manipulate what we do and think. Much of this information is also searchable by our own government under search warrant. Congressional hearings about this are currently underway. Don’t mistake me, I’m far from saying anything positive about Russia, but just saying….

Great book!! No spoilers, but it really makes you think about following the system and consequences of not.

It’s easy to dismiss Orwell’s masterpiece as a quaint and dated dystopia, a banal nightmare of the future cobbled together in 1948 out of the dingy present and the recent past: the bombed out London of the novel looks like nothing so much as that city under the blitz. The scarcities and rationing, the war frenzy, the propaganda and paranoia required no imagination to describe. They were right in front of him. Critics use Orwell’s merciless reportorial skill as a brief against his imagination. His grim fantasy is all too realistic. It fails both as fantasy and prophesy. The titular date has come and gone, they point out. The world is not divided into three super powers perpetually at war; no telescreens invade our privacy. No all-powerful totalitarian state controls our lives, which are in fact more free and prosperous than anyone could have imagined at the bleak and dreary end of the Second World War. Of the computer and the internet, plausibly the most significant new developments since that time, Orwell had not an inkling. But this superficial reading of the book, whereby we comfort ourselves with the fact that we drink Bombay Sapphire rather than Victory Gin, is tragically naive and misguided. In fact every basic concept, every philosophical and political development Orwell addressed in his book has come to pass almost exactly as described. Orwell analyzed the way people driven by the need for power actually think. This is the most useful insight in his book, delivered by the Grand Inquisitor O’Brien: “The Party seeks power entirely for it’s own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury, or long life or happiness: only power, pure power … We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture … How does one man assert his power over another? … By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering how can you be sure he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” To this bleak vision the battered and terrified Winston Smith has one reply: “Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.” Of course in the novel it is Winston Smith who is defeated and obliterated, after learning to love Big Brother. The story is unrelenting, a harsh tragedy in which the human spirit is crushed, and the future is too horrible to contemplate. The good guys lose. They are forced to betray their deepest beliefs and emotions, gutted of their souls and left to wander the streets like hollow eyed ghosts. Evil wins, over and over again, with a shriek of glee and blare of military music. The book ought to be profoundly depressing And yet it isn’t. Just the opposite: it’s uplifting, thrilling. It’s a form of meta-text: the fact that you are reading the book at all, the fact that the book was written and published, confounds the darkness of its message. Winston Smith knows no one will ever read his journal … but people will be reading the novel that contains it for as long as books exist. The authors of the Newspeak dictionary exult in the destruction of language; the mandarins of the inner Party continuously dismantle all passion and morality and truth. But the novel itself, with its vivid prose and ferocious probity creates an exhilaration, a giddy hope in the reader that its characters can never share. A masterpiece. Read it. If you've already read it, read it again.

Super book

Great book, a must read! The cover really fits with the theme of the book and looks great on the shelf

All in order.

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Chegou atrasado, mas chegou. O livro é perfeito. Esse livro é excelente para quem está aprendendo inglês.