Rating: 
Summary: Aldous Huxley questions the modern society yet again..
Review: Like in his famous novel "Brave New World", this is a utopian story, however in this case it is not a negative Utopia. Set on a tropical island and told from the point of view of a jaded journalist secretly helping an oil company interested in concessions, it explores Buddhist religion and possible alternatives to our lifestyle. No great revelations, but then, noone has the answers. A good read for Huxley fans and people who enjoy utopian stories
Rating: 
Summary: I think I read a different book than the other reviewers
Review: My main issues with the novel are that it was poorly written and Huxley utterly fails here at compelling storytelling. I could not suspend my disbelief or cynicism while reading Island at all, and I was often confused about what Huxley's point truly was. Perhaps I didn't enjoy it because the characters lecture, ramble and gloat about concepts of social engineering that are as despicable as those in Brave New World (which is a beautifully written and intricately conceived novel). Perhaps because he anniliates his own utopia, by the hands of one of its founders no less. He proves that a society such as Pala's could not exist, flourish and *survive*. He shows us in the end just how weak and fragile such a socially-engineered society would be and how easily corrupted it could become. I honestly thought it was a satire of a utopian society, like Brave New World, but attacked from the other extreme. Am I the only one who felt this? Huxley succeeds at outlining a utopian society; that much is true. Whether he actually believed in the utopia is another question entirely. The writing is so overblown and didactic that I could not discern his intent.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the best books I have read!
Review: One of the best books I have read is Aldous Huxley's 'Island'. It is a take-off on the utopia theme and not his first one on it, the earlier one being 'The Brave New World'. His 'The Brave New World' was a brilliant trenchant satire, written on the premise that the human race has only two alternatives viz. being either insane or lunatic. 'The Brave New World' was a fantasy fable. 'Island' published in 1962, 30 years after 'Brave New World' was written by a much mellowed Huxley. Huxley's premise had changed from the earlier one. He believed that humanity had a third choice, of being sane. 'Island' is no satire, less fable like, the socio-political, economic system exposited in it is less fable like, and though might seem very difficult to realize, is not impossible if we all manage to be sane! Pala is a tiny (fable) island in the Indian Ocean, where it's small community has made the best of western and eastern worlds. The inhabitants are basically Shivaite-Buddhists. They have adopted the western technology but not to the extent that the technology becomes dehumanizing and prevents them being full human beings. They have steered clear of the three pillars of the western prosperity:- armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence. They have of course their tradition of empathy for all the living beings, their respect for the environment, habitat and the practice of their traditional mind science. The Community believes that God is immanent, man is potentially transcendent. The island's enlightened community have attempted the enormous folly of trying to make a marriage between Hell and Heaven and succeeded at it. They have blended their tradition with western technology in a perfect synthesis. Rather, one of their prime credo is making the best of all the worlds. The book opens in a dramatic fashion. An English journalist on a secret mission to push the Oil interests of his tycoon boss is regaining consciousness an early morning on the fable island Pala. He had the previous afternoon procured a boat at the neighboring island (a separate country) and planned to sail into the Pala harbor. Unfortunately, he gets caught in a squall. Instead of sailing into the Pala harbor, he is washed ashore the wrong side of the Island with steep hills to be negotiated to reach habitation. Even as he is descending in the failing light of dusk, negotiating the slippery rain washed rocks, he espies snakes (not necessarily venomous) slithering around. Probably finding live snakes around for the first time in his life, he panics, loses hold and falls. Fortunately for him, this fall to the ground is cushioned by an obstructing tree. Still badly bruised, shaken and utterly terrified he loses consciousness. He regains consciousness the next morning with two Palanese urchins - a ten year old girl and a four year old boy- solicitously looking down upon him. The girl sends off the boy to get help. Meanwhile she feeds the famished journalist with bananas. The journalist is still carrying the phantom images of the slithering snakes though they are no more around. How the ten year old successfully administers therapy to the adult journalist to rid of the snakes crawling in his mind is one of the high points of the novel! One of the other high points in the novel: - the character Lakshmi, in last dying stages of terminal cancer is treated by her relatives. Death is treated as any other incident in life. It is as if Lakshmi's relatives are seeing her off for a long journey she is undertaking. She is helped in every way to live to the very fullest even as she is dying. Huxley had been deeply influenced by the book 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead' so popular in the west during 1920s & 1930s. This particular episode seems to have been inspired by 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead'. Huxley concludes the book on somewhat tragic but realistic note. Pala, the tiny oasis of sanity is finally overwhelmed, enveloped by the surrounding insanity.
Rating:
Summary: Beyond Imaginable, Beyond Compare
Review: Pala, the island in this book, is everything I've always wanted. Uncontaminated by the Western world, this island would have been an amazing place. I'm writing this review as I read the final pages of this book. However much of a cliché it is, I could not put it down, even at one AM. In the library, in my hometown, this book was classified as science fiction, but truly, it's more of a spiritual quest. The main character, Will started in the beginning of the book as a cynical, pessimistic man, but transformed drastically by the end. I think that throughout the book, I made a transformation too. If fiction can change one's life, it undoubtedly has changed mine.
Rating:
Summary: Island changed my life
Review: Perhaps it sounds pathetic, but it's true. This book has every answer you might need. And once more, it shows how we intend to complicate, instead to simplify.
It shows the way to a happier world, but before going global - it has to be personal.
And I must insist - it is NOT utopia. The word "utopia" is used for an idealistic world. Island is not idealistic - it's possible.
Rating: 
Summary: A Horrible End to Huxley's Literary Career
Review: Thanks to this book, I have to savage a writer I have always greatly respected. Aldous Huxley becomes the the person he has lampooned his entire life. This is the story of a British journalist who is shipwrecked on the fictional Island of Pala. The entire story is mainly dialogue between the journalist and the island's inhabitants. Through it we learn why everything about the way that everyone else in the history of the world has lived their lives is bad, and why the peculiar blend of science and Buddhism that the Palanese have concocted is the one true path. In most of Huxley's works, such smug idealogues are mercilessly ridiculed. I found myself waiting for the punchline after every Palanese citizen's self-righteous speech. I don't think there is anything wrong with writing something so blatantly preachy, but Huxley is no Tolstoy, and most of Palanese philosophy is flimsy, childish, and doesn't stand on its own; it is usually buttressed by making fun of the rest of the world. Whatever positives there are hiding in Palanese society are completely swamped by Huxley's relentlessly telling the rest of the world that it is wrong, wrong, wrong. It becomes irritating to have to read it page after page. OK, you say, that is merely the form of Huxley's satire in this work. I would agree, but first, Huxley's insights into the lives of the citizens of the industrialized west are so far off the mark that I felt as if I were conversing with some bitter, curmudgeonly shut-in. Second, he really doesn't give any other point of view a chance. Our journalist friend's objections are lame, half-hearted, and easily deflected. And it's strinking that Huxley doesn't make any attempt to hold the most radical Palanese ideas to as much scrutiny as he does the rest of the worlds'. We are supposed to simply accept them after being bullied for several pages about how badly man has screwed up. The main character is also a horrible point of comparison. This is a man who, as a reporter, has witnessed many of atrocities and situations of brutal poverty. He has become so disillusioned that be begins to see his fellow men as maggots. He eventually succumbs to a life of the senses and cheats on his wife, who he sends packing and who dies in a car wreck as a result of her distress. Shortly after this point, he washes up in Pala. Huxley really picked the most pathetic figure possible to convert to the Pala way of life. Of course, to him Pala seems brilliant. At the point in his life when this book was written, Huxley had become infatuated with the possibilities of mind altering drugs. His is the romantic view of, say, the Native Americans and their peyote. Everybody would be a little happier if they got to hallucinate every once and a while. This point not debateable. I mentioned Tolstoy (do I remember his being ridiculed, too?) earlier because a true vision for how to improve our society teaches us how to deal with the horrible reality we're stuck with. Of all the great ideas that came out the 1960's, the greatest were the ones that tried to change and redirect our society without rather childishly refusing it. The drop-outs really never went anywhere. Neither do Huxley's Palanese. And neither does Huxley's social criticism. The end result is that the book feels like a really smart teenager wrote it. He is so obsessed with his ideology, that he lets any style, coherence, and, well, plot fall by the wayside. (I remember the young writer in Huxley's first novel Chrome Yellow being ridiculed for writing an "art" book that nobody would want to read). This book also suffers from the huge problem that undermines ALL of Huxley's works: his obsession with the intelligentsia. It would not be hard for any of us to find the world depressing and useless if we never moved outside of this circle. A man that lived through two major world wars from the relative safety of Britain finishes his life as the world's leading pessimist on how humans have conducted their affairs. Maybe the Island is really the author, who never managed to step outside of himself to find that, believe it or not, mankind is not really in bad shape.
Rating:
Summary: A Horrible End to Huxley's Literary Career
Review: Thanks to this book, I have to savage a writer I have always greatly respected. Aldous Huxley becomes the the person he has lampooned his entire life. This is the story of a British journalist who is shipwrecked on the fictional Island of Pala. The entire story is mainly dialogue between the journalist and the island's inhabitants. Through it we learn why everything about the way that everyone else in the history of the world has lived their lives is bad, and why the peculiar blend of science and Buddhism that the Palanese have concocted is the one true path. In most of Huxley's works, such smug idealogues are mercilessly ridiculed. I found myself waiting for the punchline after every Palanese citizen's self-righteous speech. I don't think there is anything wrong with writing something so blatantly preachy, but Huxley is no Tolstoy, and most of Palanese philosophy is flimsy, childish, and doesn't stand on its own; it is usually buttressed by making fun of the rest of the world. Whatever positives there are hiding in Palanese society are completely swamped by Huxley's relentlessly telling the rest of the world that it is wrong, wrong, wrong. It becomes irritating to have to read it page after page. OK, you say, that is merely the form of Huxley's satire in this work. I would agree, but first, Huxley's insights into the lives of the citizens of the industrialized west are so far off the mark that I felt as if I were conversing with some bitter, curmudgeonly shut-in. Second, he really doesn't give any other point of view a chance. Our journalist friend's objections are lame, half-hearted, and easily deflected. And it's strinking that Huxley doesn't make any attempt to hold the most radical Palanese ideas to as much scrutiny as he does the rest of the worlds'. We are supposed to simply accept them after being bullied for several pages about how badly man has screwed up. The main character is also a horrible point of comparison. This is a man who, as a reporter, has witnessed many of atrocities and situations of brutal poverty. He has become so disillusioned that be begins to see his fellow men as maggots. He eventually succumbs to a life of the senses and cheats on his wife, who he sends packing and who dies in a car wreck as a result of her distress. Shortly after this point, he washes up in Pala. Huxley really picked the most pathetic figure possible to convert to the Pala way of life. Of course, to him Pala seems brilliant. At the point in his life when this book was written, Huxley had become infatuated with the possibilities of mind altering drugs. His is the romantic view of, say, the Native Americans and their peyote. Everybody would be a little happier if they got to hallucinate every once and a while. This point not debateable. I mentioned Tolstoy (do I remember his being ridiculed, too?) earlier because a true vision for how to improve our society teaches us how to deal with the horrible reality we're stuck with. Of all the great ideas that came out the 1960's, the greatest were the ones that tried to change and redirect our society without rather childishly refusing it. The drop-outs really never went anywhere. Neither do Huxley's Palanese. And neither does Huxley's social criticism. The end result is that the book feels like a really smart teenager wrote it. He is so obsessed with his ideology, that he lets any style, coherence, and, well, plot fall by the wayside. (I remember the young writer in Huxley's first novel Chrome Yellow being ridiculed for writing an "art" book that nobody would want to read). This book also suffers from the huge problem that undermines ALL of Huxley's works: his obsession with the intelligentsia. It would not be hard for any of us to find the world depressing and useless if we never moved outside of this circle. A man that lived through two major world wars from the relative safety of Britain finishes his life as the world's leading pessimist on how humans have conducted their affairs. Maybe the Island is really the author, who never managed to step outside of himself to find that, believe it or not, mankind is not really in bad shape.
Rating:
Summary: i want to live in pala
Review: this book describes aldous huxley's vision for how human beings could live if we would acknowledge that we are neither perfect or fatally flawed ... just a group of animals living on a planet together. if we dealt with that, we could then use our big brains to minimize the suffering of life. the ending of this book is, though, a bit of a travesty. what huxley spends hundreds of pages building gets knocked away in just a chapter. another writer i know of, jean houston, says that she asked huxley about the ending of island and he said he lost the last bit of the manuscript and had to very quickly re-do it. happens to the best of us i guess. you will like this book, though, if your friends accuse you of being an idealist. funny how 'idealist' is the word used to describe people like huxley, who look around them and despair because of their purely pragmatic knowledge that what we are doing now (as a society and a world) is not working.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: This book is more than a novel. It is a philosophy and more than anything it is a book about hope, about what we as humans can achieve with just the right viewpoint. Those who liked BNW may not find this as enjoyable though, for the overall message is possitive and less sardonic (probably why it wasn't as successful!). But if you aren't afraid to think, this book is a true pleasure to experience.
Rating:
Summary: People are missing the point
Review: This book is wonderful but probably in a different way than many people think. Huxley wrote this the year before he died. And in a letter his wife wrote shortly after his death she says that Huxley was appaled that people didn't take it serious. His entire lifes wisdom was summed up in island. The seemingly slow moving plotline and the somewhat underdeveloped characters are not flaws they are fully intentional. This was done so that the attention of the reader would lean more towards the palanese way of life and less towards the things going on. He has a strong point when it comes to eastern philosophy being concerned with what works, and western with what is real. And the issue of psychedelics was nicely addressed. Some parts did get a little cheesy but that's understandable because he was such an emotional man. He also recycles alot of words but this doesn't bother me because it is such a beautiful book. Island is so much better than BNW. You should read it...
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