Fahrenheit 451

Rating:
Summary: Bradbury's Look At Censorship
Review: Guy Montag is an ordinary fireman, if you consider a book burning, flame-thrower wielding zealot to be just that.

Ray Bradbury(author of The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes)tells the story of a society so frightened by its own intellectual and creative potential that "book learning" becomes a criminal offense.

Montag, along with his equally ambitious coworkers, burns the home of any man or woman unfortunate enough to be hiding printed literature. But when one woman refuses to leave her home and then stoicly burns beside her collection of books, Montag dares to wonder if all books are so dangerous as the government has trained him to believe.

Of course, I can't forget to mention Clarisse, a young woman who seems interested in helping Montag decide for himself whether or not his line of work is justified or foolishly cruel.

Fahrenheit 451 is about censorship and the lengths that a future government might go to to restrict the public's ability to access past knowledge. Orwell's 1984 was a slightly better example of this kind of story, but that doesn't take away from the satisfaction of Mr. Bradbury's finely written classic. The book's pace becomes incredibly exciting as Montag learns of his mistakes and decides to go against the common will. The fugitive chase and scholarly transients who keep passages of important texts in their memories(the Bible seems a popular choice of Bradbury)is a near perfect final touch.

Go ahead, read this book. It has a lot to say about an important and complex subject and easily keeps your attention throughout.

Rating:
Summary: An Amazing Book
Review: Well while waiting for a late friend I happened to be wanderingaround a bookstore when this book caught my eye. I had heard about itsomewhere but I wasn't really sure what it was about. I picked it up and read a few pages, walked to the cashier and bought it. Not just because it addressed important issues of censorship, but because it made me really CARE about censorship and how important the issue was.

Rating:
Summary: A well written book more relevant today than ever!
Review: Read this book! This, sadly prophetic, book truly reflects modern day life. Amazingly, people don't read anymore, BY CHOICE! Were offended by any and all things serious. Life has become nothing but trivial, meaningless, stupid, "fun." The movies, television, pastimes, everything, is completely empty and devoid of all substance, if it actually has a point, then it's called "overly serious." After all, we just want to "have fun;" why waste our lives trying to fix problems? Forget the problems! Life's too short! Eat, drink, tomorrow we may die! Ozone depletion, global warming? Bah! Human beings like you and I starving to death? I don't see it! Poverty, pollution, living beyond our means, injustice, racism, classism, sexism, hatred of all differences, greed, and countless other serious problems? Who cares, I don't see 'em! Flick on the TV!... and all these other anoexic, empty-headed, cuties we all aspire to be, who have nothing to offer us but "cute-ness," and, of course, the planned obsolesence of the latest clothing fads, etc!

How have we gone this far over the edge? Why don't we read? Why don't we care? Why don't we think? Why do we allow this to go on? Ray Bradbury tackles all these questions and more in his book. While this isn't a difficult book to read, it is slow reading, because, to get the point, you must continually stop reading and think about what you've read, to ask the important questions: Is it better to know, or not to know? Is it better to read, or not to read? Why do I read? Why do I think? How do I separate two conflicting truths, which are equally true? Join Montag, Clarisse, Faber, Beatty, Stoneman and Black, Mildrid, Granger, and the other characters of Fahrenheit 451 to help you find these answers.

What a great book!

Rating:
Summary: la temperatura a la que los libros arden.
Review: esta novela de corte futurista, nos muestra un futuro dominado por la cultura de la mass media controlada por un gobierno central que prohibe e inhibe lo mejor de cada ser humano, el derecho de discernir, de pensar, de estar en desacuerdo, de estar tristes al compas de una novela, a quedarnos boquiabiertos con un tratado de filosofia.en la sociedad que describe Bradbury, los bomberos se dedican a apagar la sed de curiosidad de los seres inquisitivos, se dedican a quemar libros para que la gente no pueda tener acceso a la informacion y que jamas salgan de su pobreza mental y de su atraso, pues quien controla la informacion, controla al pueblo. es una obra excelente de lo que tal vez podria ser en un futuro no muy distante.

LUIS MENDEZ [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: a book that makes you think
Review: highly recommended reading by Bradbury fans as well as those not familiar with his work

Rating:
Summary: The Firemen of Tomorrow
Review: The Firemen of tomorrow do not put out fires anymore..... they START them. This story about a fireman doubting his job is absolutely riveting. Guy Montag thought he was happy. Then a girl named Clarisse came onto the scene. Her sudden disappearance and/or death leads to his unsettlement. When his wife, Mildred turns him in, he must burn his own house. He finds hope with a group of shabby old professors. Ray Bradbury must have been psychic to write a book that hits this close to home. Who knows, Fahrenheit 451 may be the future. This book is a MUST for children to read in the classroom.

Rating:
Summary: Hurrah for Bradbury!
Review: Art imitating life? One need only contemplate the depths of political correctness to see the coming new order. Utopian societies are hellish and brutally banal at the same time. Like Jerry Furland's terrifying novel "Transfer - the end of the beginning", Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" delivers a message and a vision of the future that is bleakly horrifying. You will devour both of these fine novels in a sitting. Guaranteed.

Rating:
Summary: A very disappointing book
Review: I thought this was one of the worst books I've ever read. The characters were entirely unconvincing - e.g. the professor with the strange name who can only express himself using metaphors. The plot is just a predictable and flimsy excuse for a parable about the dangers of modern society. I read it, because I'd bought it, but I found almost every word an insult to my intelligence.

Rating:
Summary: Fahrenheit 451 = Compassion 101
Review: This is a powerfully symbolic, futuristic story about how, if we lose sight of the appreciation of human frailty, we open the doors to a cruelty that destroys open-mindedness. In this case the open-mindedness that is targeted is the poetry and philosophy of great writers of books. It is censored by cynics whose main impetus is to keep the peace. Such cynics are allowed to censor us and destroy us if we think too deeply, and all citizens must never read poetic or philosophical books, which are also periodically destroyed in order to hide any inkling of deep thought from our brains.

What a fascinating concept! So daring, obscure, seemingly wild and fictional on the surface, yet also a perfect metaphor for our current lives. Bradbury is clever: he changes our police into firemen. But it is clear that he means to criticise the possibility of police totalitarianism within an American styled system of injustice as justice. The distaste for intelligent though impractical philosophy and poetry, it has here been allowed to run amuck, to wield its forces of pragmatism to the extreme. And we are left to wonder if this could in fact be the wet dream of every right-wing American who would refuse to expend taxes on grounds that the money would be used for "another damned pinko library."

Here Bradbury shows us that intelligence can be used by cynics, such as Captain Beatty, in a way that would harm us. But also that same intelligence, found in poetic and philosophical books, can be used as a means to gain the strength of compassion. Apparently, it's all in the way one uses the great thoughts of the great writers.

The irony in this is found in how so many good thinking, faithful American Christians etc. have turned against poetic and philosophical thought, believing it to be their enemy, since for one, they don't understand it and are thus afraid of it, and for two, because often the irony inherent in such such poetry and philosophy is the bread and butter of cynics who would destroy simple faith and compassion.

Within this richly ironic theme are placed characters who seem to defy all compassion and sensitivity; they are brutally insensitive and apathetic. Then come along the few rebels who cannot keep themselves from reading the illegal poetic and philosophical thoughts from old books. They are rebels who fear for their lives. In swoops the police with mechanical hounds that would drug the rebels to death and the familiar helicopters with cameras to record the images of the chase, that is, as long as the chase turns out to their advantage - if not, the scene will be edited: American styled CIA propaganda.

This novel is not necessarily about the future, it is an allegory of the present, in fact, of a common human condition that has always been with us. Hence, this is what makes it a classic on the level of Melville, Steinbeck, Twain etc. In the end, the intellectual vagabonds, torn from a blissfully ignorant, apathetic and finally totalitarian society bent on a shallow "happiness" above all else, gather to memorize what fine, poetic and philosophical literature they are able to preserve. In comparison to their nemises, these heroes of the printed word appear kind and compassionate. They are peaceful readers of deeply philosophical teachings, such as found in the bible and other great works.

Back in the conformed, self-destroying society live the insensitive brutes of conformity, where Montag enjoyed harming innocent people before he rediscovered himself, where cynical Captain Beatty loved the smell of burning flesh as much as burning paper, where Mildred and her "family" (TV) live out apathetic lives of self-denial, where Montag's pals at the fire station snicker and belittle each other to a deafening mental silence, where the mechanical hound injects the murderous poison without a second thought, where the "beetles" (cars) that ruthlessly speed along the highways seek to destroy innocent pedestrians in fun, and most importantly, where the symbolic story of the sieve lives out its final days: older children ruthlessly finding humor in a young child hopelessly trying to fill up a sieve with sand. You may witness such insensitivity in your day to day lives <if> you open your eyes to it.

Rating:
Summary: ATTN: Fundies! I own this book and WILL use it!
Review: What a profound Novel!

This should be required reading to all students. But alas, the future Bradbury predicted has come to pass.... Today, we are seeing more and more "Concerned Parents" reacting with a mob mentality in banning books from libraries and schools. Most have never read the books they have chosen to vilify. Strange that only a few outspoken right wing groups think they speak for all of society.

The irony of it all is that Fahrenheit 451 has been banned from schools and classrooms because of its "negative" views toward those individuals that ban books. What is more tragic than a books that decries book banning, being banned itself?

Do yourself a favor.... read this book. Pass it along to your child. Read other banned novels and keep them in circulation.

The days of the Fireman are quickly approaching.

"Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, as I trust shall never be put out!"