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Product Description
From Amazon.com
In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't put out fires--they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury's vividly painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal--a place where trivial information is good, and knowledge and ideas are bad. Fire Captain Beatty explains it this way, "Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs.... Don't give them slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."
Guy Montag is a book-burning fireman undergoing a crisis of faith. His wife spends all day with her television "family," imploring Montag to work harder so that they can afford a fourth TV wall. Their dull, empty life sharply contrasts with that of his next-door neighbor Clarisse, a young girl thrilled by the ideas in books, and more interested in what she can see in the world around her than in the mindless chatter of the tube. When Clarisse disappears mysteriously, Montag is moved to make some changes, and starts hiding books in his home. Eventually, his wife turns him in, and he must answer the call to burn his secret cache of books. After fleeing to avoid arrest, Montag winds up joining an outlaw band of scholars who keep the contents of books in their heads, waiting for the time society will once again need the wisdom of literature.
Bradbury--the author of more than 500 short stories, novels, plays, and poems, including The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man--is the winner of many awards, including the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. Readers ages 13 to 93 will be swept up in the harrowing suspense of Fahrenheit 451, and no doubt will join the hordes of Bradbury fans worldwide. --Neil Roseman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From AudioFile
This cautionary tale published in the 1950s is even more chilling and disturbing today in this new production. Narrator Scott Brick portrays fireman Guy Montag with the overarching dread of a man realizing that the world he helped to create is not one in which he wishes to live. Guy burns books for a living, but when book-loving neighbor Clarisse "disappears" and leaves her books for Guy, he chooses to take her books and live with a group of intellectuals who are mem-orizing the contents of books in hopes that one day the world will regain its sanity. Brick's characterizations are so compelling that book-loving listeners may find tears at the corners of their eyes. R.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Fell short of expectations,
This review is from: Fahrenheit 451 (Mass Market Paperback)
I heard so much about this book before I finally picked it up. And when I did get around to reading it...I wasn't impressed. Yes, the author's ideas are scary: That in the future, firemen set fires to burn books. One firefighter, Guy Montag, begins to look at his life more closely and discovers how empty it is. He begins to take books home from many of the places he has destroyed. Clarisse, Guy's next door neighbor, and seemingly the one that set his book-stealing into motion, is one of the most interesting characters. Unfortunately, she disappears without much explanation. I did see some good messages in this vision of the future, but I felt a little bit cheated too, because I wanted to get a better glimpse at this society that spawned this fire fighter-book burners. I'm not debating if it should be a classic or not, I'm just saying it was not personally a very good book to me.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Bad Book,
By Ben Hemani (North of Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Fahrenheit 451 (Mass Market Paperback)
The book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury in my opinion is extremely confusing and difficult to read. The setting is in a futuristic world, where books are banned and anyone who is caught with books are prosecuted. The main character, Montag, is a fireman whose job is to burn books. The world he lives in is plain and dull, and he becomes desperate for something exciting, so he begins to read the books that he burns. Once caught by his fellow fireman, Montag must flee from his home and run away to escape imprisonment or possibly death. In the book, some of the concepts are hard to understand, and the futuristic conceptions in the book may confuse the reader. The vocabulary isn't too difficult, but there are sections of the book that may set the reader off track. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone younger than the seventh grade level, and I would recommend this book to people who like science-fiction. Personally, I thought this book was very boring and it didn't capture my interest.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The state of censorship,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fahrenheit 451 (Mass Market Paperback)
I picked up this book because I had absoutely loved Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. I thought I would like this book, considering its subject matter. I was completely wrong. Those that compared this to the other two masterpieces, failed to note one thing: Whereas the other two are written in haunting, intense, breathlessly engaging style, this book is in comparison rather choppy in its language. If the language style was not so dry, maybe I would have enjoyed slightly more. Furthermore, the book lacks any suspense whatsoever. Instead of staying up all night by my bed to finish the book, I had to constantly skip pages because of its rather boring and dry writing. I also found the characters particularly unsympathetic and unable to identify with. Instead of drawing me in, I had to force myself to finish the book (after repeatedly skimming through some unbearably slow sections). For such a small book, it's not easy to turn off a reader so many times. In addition, the book feels distant and unrealistic. It misses the realism to resonate with today's society, but it also lacks the bleak prophecy of a warning. Instead, near the end of the book, the author gave a not very subtlely disguised lecture on censorship, which is fine, except for the face that it feels like the author had left the world of storytelling and abruptly intrude into his own stories. He could not get the point across by the story itself; he had to announce it out. I also found the ending a bit ridiculous and incredulous. If words were so easily preserved in memories, we would not need writing. If the brain were so indiscriminating in its selectivity, we would not have conflicting memories. And although this book was supposedly an anti-censorship novel, I did not walk away from this book feeling the horrow of censorship. Instead, I wished I had not wasted my time on reading this book.
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