Ray Bradbury, RIP: Fahrenheit 451 Is Still Misinterpreted. We, ...Are Enslaving Ourselves

LA Weekly ^ | June 6, 2012 | Jill Stewart

[C19fan]

Ray Bradbury, in a 2009 interview with LA Weekly at his Cheviot Hills home, explained with gusto a fact that shocked millions of fans: Fahrenheit 451 was not a warning about government mind control. The world got that wrong. His warning was, we are doing it to ourselves -- enslaved to glowing screens.

.........................................................

Bradbury imagined a democratic society whose diverse population turns against books: Whites reject Uncle Tom's Cabin and blacks disapprove of Little Black Sambo. He imagined not just political correctness, but a society so diverse that all groups were "minorities." He wrote that at first they condensed the books, stripping out more and more offending passages until ultimately all that remained were footnotes, which hardly anyone read. (Emphasis Mine)

[knarf]

After reading F451, I knew that the theme was a war against knowledge and that the only sure way to preserve knowledge was for someone to memorize the information, whether amusement reading, or factual history .. because books were being destroyed, and once the books were gone, anyone could say anything and get away with it, because there was no way to disprove nor verify.

I wonder why the author opened this story with that, "the world got it wrong" crap.

Maybe he's part of the book burning club ??

[ChocChipCookie]

Do you think this book is suitable reading for 13 year old kids? I bought the book yesterday and have been thinking of putting it on my daughter’s summer reading list.

[lump in the melting pot]

Absolutely! Books like F451 make a person think, there is nothing wrong with pondering the (sometimes ugly) nature of the world and of human nature when you are 13. Beats the snot out of the vapid vampire & magic books that are all the rage (among the minority of teens who actually read) these days.

[ansel12]

He is sure correct about Mel Gibson being the only one able to make Fahrenheit 451 correctly.

““Mel Gibson owns Fahrenheit 451,” he says. “The mistake they made with the first one was to cast Julie Christie as both the revolutionary and the bored wife.” One of his enduring beefs is that “screenwriters don’t know a god**** thing about writing — they didn’t grow up in a library, consuming words. When I grew up, I was educated. They are not.”

His dearest hope was that Gibson would reject what Bradbury called typical low-brow Hollywood studio decision-making, in which a shallow screenwriter who can’t handle the depth of his material is brought on to screw things up.””

[knarf]

If your daughter can understand the concepts of big government, tyranny, right against wrong .. I'd say, yes.

I think if she were to then discover her school books are altered (Martin Luther King Jr but no George Washington, f'rinstance), it'll go a long way in shaping her political mind.

[DManA]

I heard an interview with Bradbury’s grandson yesterday. He said Ray considered “Fahrenheit 451” his ONLY science fiction book. Everything else he considered fantasy.

Then today I heard a replay of a speech he made in 2000. He claimed that he remembered his birth ( maybe because he was a 10 month baby). He also remembered waking up in his crib after a nightmare about his birth.

[dorothy]

I read it when I was 12 and it left a huge impression on me. It didn't frighten me as much as uplift me -- just the thought of groups of people recalling bits and snippets of literature so a whole could be recreated encouraged me to think well of my fellow man.

Should point out that I was an early reader and books were a very large part of my life (no TV where we lived), so that may have influenced me. You might read it first and then decide, but I see no reason not to offer it to her.

[Lee N. Field]

Do you think this book is suitable reading for 13 year old kids? I bought the book yesterday and have been thinking of putting it on my daughter’s summer reading list.

That would be about when I read it.