1984 Reviews

Bottom-Line: I implore all freedom loving people to read 1984; it is depressing, but then again so is life in general for the most part. 

I have heard the term "Big Brother is watching you" all of my life, without really understanding fully what the phrase implied.  I knew it was meant to signify that the government is in your business, but the full weight of the phrase was lost on me until I actually took the time to read George Orwell's seminal novel 1984 a little while ago for the first time in my life. 

First published in 1950, 1984 is a chilling, depressing, and yes, heartbreaking look...

Being born after the Russian revolution I have not experienced a culture so terrorized.

Reading Orwell's beautifully crafted and emotionally attaching book has not only taught me about the Revolution that swept a country, but also about the power of such things as language and history. I read this book and then read the Spark Notes book as well, and learned a lot more about not only the history behind Orwell, but his reasons for writing 1984 and Animal Farm. Both of which are very well written and deeply moving. I can't possibly give you everything that happens in this amazing book, so I urge...

I read this book back in 1971 and have been watching it happen ever since. When I think back as to how it was when I was a child and how things are now, I see how free we really were back then. Things I loved as a child, I have stopped doing now because of Government interference. My daughter stopped riding her bike the first time I told her she had to wear a helmet. My mother taught me how to drive, all the etiquit of sharing the road and how to be cautious. I also taught my daughter but still had to put out $$$$ for her to take a driving class. She had learned more than they ever would have taught...

I love this novel. It is brilliantly written and frightening in its forecasts; the concepts of "Big Brother" and "doublespeak" have entered our everyday language. However, when forced by time constraints to choose between this dystopia and Aldous Huxley's classic _Brave New World_, I have to opt for the latter. Though Orwell brilliantly predicted much of what would happen in Stalinist Russia, those paradigms seem, happily, to be dying (though we must keep an eye on Putin). _Brave New World_, on the other hand, remains supremely relevant in its chilling description of forced consumerism and reproductive...