“I just now decided that I have to re-read Brave New World. I seem to recall that at about age 30 - which was considered the beginning of ‘over the hill’ age at that time, the members of the worker class were sent to a ‘hospital’ where they were comfortably medicated to death. Am I right? Never read Animal Farm - a gap in my education.”
Go for it!
You MUST read Animal Farm. I guarantee you WILL enjoy it. It is a MUST read.
http://www.george-orwell.org/Animal_Farm/index.html
In fact, read it free on the above link. You will want to get it for yourself.
Here are reviews for it on Amazon
I would also highly recommend 1984.
Here’s part of one review:
...
The completely classic “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” is one we must keep in mind whenever politicians start using words as if they mean the reverse of what they do mean.
1984, too, has its beautifully classic lines. The main characters are all members of the Ingsoc Party (English Socialism). It is not until well into the book that we learn they are only some 15% of the population; the rest are proles. The proles are easily dismissed as insignificant: “They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.” Use that line the next time someone tells you it’s not important to educate our entire population to the best of their capabilities.
When the main character, Winston Smith, attempts to placate his tormenter by saying “You are ruling over us for our own good,” he is scorned as “stupid, Winston, stupid.” The party big shot responds with one of the most chilling lines I have ever read: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
Through the medium of conversations in the lunch room of the “Ministry of Truth,” Orwell is able to tell us much about the creation and preservation of a totalitarian state. One key is the control over language which the Party exercises: “Newspeak.” One of the people working on the Newspeak dictionary explains it to Winston: “You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting language down to the bone.” He brags that very soon “all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.”
Putting these two in a single hardbound volume and adding a thoughtful introduction by Christopher Hitchens was a stroke of genius on the part of Harcourt Books. It will make it all the easier for professors of political science, literature, history, psychology . . . indeed, if it was not such a contradiction with regard to books so dedicated to liberty, I’d say make them required reading.
Barbara J. Frederick “auntb93
CLASSIC TRUTH!
It’s happening NOW - the evil in these books.