About this title: A satirical novel depicting a scientific and industrialized utopia in which Ford and Freud are worshipped, eugenics policies have eliminated class conflicts (while strengthening the division of the classes), and personal unhappiness is assuaged through drugs and pornography.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: SparkNotes
Date Published: 2002
ISBN-13:9781586633660ISBN:158663366X
Description: Very Good. Slight cover wear with minor scuffing to edges. Some page corners present folding. GoodwillnyBooks is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service. You may return new items within 30 days of delivery for a full refund. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1967
Description: Fair. Bantam edition, paperback, 2nd printing September 1955. Some spinal edge/shelf wear, Shiny, intact covers and spine; tanning due to age. Reliable and accurate service. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780060929879ISBN:0060929871
Description: Acceptable. A readable copy. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (the dust cover may be missing). Pages can include considerable notes-in pen or highlighter-but the notes cannot obscure the text. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Harper and Row, New York
Date Published: 1969
Description: Fair. No dust jacket as issued. Back cover stained. Signed on fly leaf by previous owner, but the signature is blacked out with sharpie. Pages slightly yellowed from age. xxiii, 278 p.; 20 cm. read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Book is in good reading condition. Cover has wear at edges and corners, and may have creases. Spine has wear at edges and creases. read more
Description: Good. Book is in good reading condition. Cover has wear at edges and corners, and may have creases. Spine has wear at edges and creases. read more
"I must have read this a dozen times before I fully grasped the central point. It was the foreword to another book, Neil Postman's AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH, that finally spelled it out for me.
Huxley's radical notion is difficult to grasp, but as simple as Postman's title: it's not war or foreign oppressors or Big Brother that will get us. It's our prosperity, technology, and insatiable appetite for distractions. In other words, if nothing else corrupts the West, we will very happily Amuse Ourselves to Death.
This is the warning of Brave New World, and it seems truer every day. Consider the money earned by celebrities and sports heroes, entertainers all of them. What other culture in history could afford to pay its entertainers so well? Our lives are no longer consumed by sweat and toil. We work, of course, but for so many work is now merely a distraction between wall-to-wall entertainment: 100s of channels of television, movies, portable music available anywhere, gaming devices, hand-held internet, pornography at your fingertips, and courts with no idea how to define "obscenity." As long as we're entertained, few of us will question the content. On the news, if it bleeds, it leads. In advertising, sex sells. And if the sit-coms are funny, who cares if the morality trends ever-downward? I must be a prude for mentioning it at all, right? We now live in a culture where everyone can explain the "it" factor that makes someone a star, but no one can use the word morality without seeming like some kind of backward Savage.
Just like the Savage in Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD."
"When I began reading BNW, I was charmed by Huxley's use of prose and the horrific irony of his dystopian sterile fertility center in the first few chapters. Having finished the book, I find myself dissatisfied with Huxley's prose. After the first three chapters, the prose isn't much to talk about. He doesn't continue writing with the same depth and artful beauty. I think the initial burst was only a hook, which is a dirty, dirty literary trick. I can understand that he would use simplicity in prose to convey strong ideas, but the way in which he executed it left me unsated and wanting. (Although I will say I am very biased right now, because I'm reading Nabokov)
Beyond that, the interesting thing about my experience with BNW was the following:
While I was reading, and fully immersed, beyond the context in which it was written, some of Huxley's ideas seemed pastiche. A common dystopic sci-fi. But after being relinquished from the fictive dream, about halfway through (and after a brief peek at the copyright date (1932), I realized my ennui with a book written nearly eighty years ago was rather astonishing. I'm pleased with the sagacity of many of Huxley's ideas. The book resonates with the modern world, and that's why it's so highly regarded today.
All in all, I found BNW disappointing. The turpitude of prose bait and switch, the simple plot, the dissatisfying ending..
I would like to know more about the context of the world in which the book was written. I think that would provide a little more insight, a little more appreciation.
It's worth reading, it still provides a cautionary tale like all good dystopian novels should, and is quite relevant, which says something, given when it was written, but beyond that, it's not the best dystopic novel out there."
"The future possibilities are so true it's disturbing. It takes the what-ifs of the unknown, of the future, and turns it into a world where everything glorified in the present is taken to the extreme.
Who's to decide what is superior? Why does technology, science, materialism, sexuality, standardization, and drugs constitute the 'high life?' Why is culture, tradition, creativity/art, individuality, family and manual work considered inferior?
Questions like these are sure to plague you as you read. Huxley has a way with words that is often haunting and effective, but also overly sophisticated (have the dictionary at hand!). For its time, the book's genius.
It's one that'll be sure to make you more conscious of your present. Aside from all the technology that's constantly calling your name, don't forget the other side to life...the side that makes you unique."
"There's some provocative discussion of this book in Houellebecq's Les Particules Elémentaires, which I just finished. One of the characters argues that Huxley originally intended his world as a utopia rather than a dystopia, and then changed his mind and tried to convince everyone it was meant ironically.
The proof? Apart from the caste system, which has been rendered unnecessary by computers, this is the world we're busily trying to create for ourselves, and which almost everyone would actually like to live in. Huxley's just telling it like it is. I don't believe Houellebecq's argument, but at least it's different!"
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