Rating: 
Summary: Not a masterpiece, but still worth a read.
Review: The book has its quirks that make it more difficult to read now than it might have been in 1928. The proportion of dialogue to plot movement makes the book's structure look like an extended parlor discussion with only a few events that "happen to them" in between. The book is also stuffed to the limit with exposition on the nearly dozen main characters, each of whose primary flaw is both explained in narrative and demonstrated not in action, but in dialogue. Third, the details of 1920s British politics and the scholarly dialogue make some parts difficult to follow, to the point of obscurity.However, these flaws do not outweigh the sparkling portions of the book. If Huxley's dissection of the modern soul weren't so witheringly accurate and complete, this book might not have made mention outside its immediate time and place. Although this is from late in the book (Chapter 36), this passage (a journal entry in Philip Quarles' notebook) gives the summary statement of the problem: "It's incomparably easier to know a lot, say, about the history of art and to have profound ideas about metaphysics and sociology than to know personally and intuitively a lot about one's fellows, one's wife and children. Living's much more difficult than Sanskrit or chemistry or economics. The intellectual life is child's play; which is why intellectuals tend to become children -- and then imbeciles and finally, as the political and industrial history of the last few centuries clearly demonstrates, homicidal lunatics and wild beasts. The repressed functions don't die; they deteriorate, they fester, they revert to primitiveness. But meanwhile it's much easier to be an intellectual child or lunatic or beast than a harmonious adult man." Huxley demonstrates this general principle in his characters, all of whom are intellectuals of the moment and are engaged in fields of painting, writing, biology, politics, religion, and seduction, and all of whom share neither the solution to the unhappiness of their predicament, or the moral strength to overcome their weaknesses. This is a morality play, but not of the traditional kind. Here, the tempter is not a horned figure with a pitchfork. Rather, it is a consequence of the modern world: the balkanization of the fields of knowledge and the allure of "whoring after abstractions" at the expense of arresting the development of real human qualities. To this extent, I don't believe this problem has been solved even with the transition forward from the modern world into a post-modern one, and the character studies still largely ring true today. That's not to say that today's moralists would agree to Huxley's solution to this problem. Rampion, the least flawed character in the book, says this as a rebuke to the religious ascetics and to the sexual and intellectual fetishists alike: "[I]t's a damned sight better to behave like a beast -- a real, genuine, undomesticated animal, I mean -- than to invent a devil and then behave like one's invention." Judging by how Huxley spent his life thereafter, it appears that this was his own view as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but not engaging
Review: The novel looks at more priveleged members of English society. Often, Huxley deals with their relationships and ponderings of the impact of scientific developments on society. Much of this is done well. However, the book is not one that engrosses the reader. The book was a chore to finish. Despite having some interesting personality traits and views, I found the characters mostly boring. The characters seemed to lack vitality. Is that a characteristic of the portion of society of which Huxley wrote?
Rating: 
Summary: An all-encompassing portrait of 1920's English intellectuals
Review: This is simply an amazing book. Compulsively readable even while it dazzles with long bravura political/intellectual conversations. You finish the book with a real feel for a particular moment in time, politically, artistically, personally and intellectually. What astonished me more is that Huxley creates a fictional character who eerily foreshadows the real life figure of Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader of the 1930s. When I first read the book, I thought it was an actual, lightly fictionalized portrait of Mosley and his movement, only to learn that in fact Mosley did not come to prominence concurrent with the book. Do not miss this.
Rating:
Summary: points about Point Counterpoint
Review: This striking portrait of early 20th century high society is the first book I read by Aldous Huxley. While exposing the lavish lifestyle of the literary and social elite as one of hypocracy and shared animosity, it also carries a strong philisophical undercurrent. He uses the satirical charaterizations to expound on his personal docterine, and does so in a way that is both accessable and entertaining.
At times the book tended to be a tad meandering, without any real plot-driving focus of conflict, but somehow the lack of a linear plot deveopment is not that big of an issue once you get caught up in the flow of his writing style. I do caution readers to avoid the foreward, as it reveals one of the few major plot developments.
This is one of my all time favorite novels, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys biting satire, brilliant dialogue, and discourses on a variety of subjects that are still applicable nearly a century later. And how can one resist a book that fits in the phrase "the stertorous borborygmy of dispepsia"?
Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: This was probably the most disappointing book on the Modern Library list. I loved Brave New World, but it seems that I misunderstood one of it's main points. Huxley apparently opposed science and meant the book to be as much a warning about a science dominated future, as a warning about authoritarian government in general. From this perspective, Brave New World is nearly a crypto-Luddite tract. Huxley was generally something of a sensualist and an anti-rationalist. Like most men before him, he was troubled by the body/mind dichotomy that uniquely confronts humankind. But unlike the great thinkers who have been responsible for nearly all human progress, he (along with his friend DH Lawrence) came down on the side of the body and sensory experience, rejecting reason, science, religion, etc.. It seems to me that to choose the body over the mind is to reject the divine spark in man in favor of the animal instinct. Point Counter Point, a voluminous, wildly overpopulated, completely outdated roman a clef is meant to vindicate his viewpoint, but is so sarcastic as to undermine even his own arguments. Despite some funny set pieces and some interesting ideas, I'd not recommend this book and may have to revisit Brave New World. GRADE: D
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, if slow moving
Review: Though the book takes it's sweet time in making it's points, in the end the payoff is well worth it. You realize that everyone in the book indeed is in one way or another a total jerk, and then the scary thing is when you realize you, and everyone you know, is somehow like any number of the characters. Great debate within over the struggle between passion and reason, hedonism and cold pursuit of "progress" or "The better good". The book may seem slow, but there is no other way the story, or points could have been effectively made.
Rating:
Summary: Insightful satire of intellectual society
Review: Wonderful reading, terrific character development, and Huxley does a great job of personifying the main characters, all of whom weave in and out of readers' focus and each others' lives while all the time expanding on such subjects as: materialism, intellect, social staidness & frivolity. There is also,of course, my favorite character: Lucy Tantamount - who boogies to her own tune & lives her own life at a time when women didn't really "enjoy themselves as a man does." A lot of different perspectives on life, love & learning which are sure to expand the mind.
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