FAHRENHEIT 451 (audiobook) by Ray Bradbury

 

Originally published in 1953.

I listened to the Tantor Media audio version published in 2010.

Read by Stephen Hoye

Duration: Approximately 5.5 hours

Unabridged

Synopsis: 

Guy Montag is a fireman in a future United States. Firemen in the future do not fight fires. Instead, they burn books, newspapers, magazines that people have hidden away. If you hide forbidden media in your home your home will be burned to make sure all of the books are gone and to serve as a warning to rest of the neighborhood. 

Montag is great at his job, but he has his doubts. Every once in a while he takes a book home. He hides them in the ventilation system of the house. No one knows, not even his wife. Those doubts are accelerated when his team witness a woman die in the fire with her books rather than live without them...

My review: 

This book has an interesting history. Bradbury started building the world that this book is set in with some short stories of a dystopian future where everyone is absorbed by personalized television screens. His publisher urged him to expand the ideas into a book. Bradbury knocked out Fahrenheit 451 in just 9 days on a rented typewriter that cost him 10 cents per half hour.

The book itself has action but it oftentimes felt like essays attached by plot points. It seems to me that the speed in which the book was written probably led to this sort of construction. The essays took the form of extended trains of thought by Montag or long speeches/rants from Montag's boss, Captain Beatty. These "essays" make all of the arguments of the story such as the justifications for mass censorship, the arguments against it, and the lack of human contact in a mass media world.

Bradbury accurately predicted a lot of the modern world in this book. When it comes to technology, he predicted the ATM, giant screen televisions, and earbuds. Culturally, he predicted the rise of sports TV, the inane reality TV shows like The Real Housewives, and the addiction to pop culture and electronic media that may be a factor in the high rates of depression among young people nowadays.

This has to be considered Bradbury's masterpiece. It is such a powerful manifesto against censorship. 

NOTE: If you appreciate irony, please read this bit about how THE anti-censorship novel of the 20th century was edited to remove or change controversial and offensive words and scenes without the knowledge of the author - FOR TWELVE YEARS!

NOTE: Also on the "if you appreciate irony" category - Fahrenheit 451 was put on a book ban list in Tennessee. The article has a searchable database because the list has more than 1,100 unique titles.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury.

Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech and the Twilight of the West by Mark Steyn

Fascinating, entertaining and important

Published in 2009 by Stockade Books.

For those of you who are not aware, Mark Steyn was brought before three courts of Canada's Human Rights Commission for violating the human rights of some Muslim students and the Canadian Islamic Congress. You see, in Canada, your right not to be offended is more important than your right to speak your mind (except in the hypocritical cases Steyn has fun with throughout the book).

What was Steyn's crime? Maclean's magazine printed excerpts from his book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. This was a bestseller in America and Canada but if he was found guilty the books would be pulled from all Canadian bookstores and Maclean's would have to be minded by politically correct nanny censors. Steyn is continually amazed that "large numbers of Canadians apparently think there's nothing wrong in subjecting the contents of political magazines to the approval of agents of the state." (p. 4)

Mark Steyn

Steyn details the fight against these three cases. Along the way he generates lots of memorable quotes such as, "I don't want to get off the hook. I want to take the hook and stick it up the collective butt of these thought police." (p. 5)

So, Steyn includes offending comments from the excerpts that brought him to court. He also includes columns that were included as supporting evidence. As a bonus he includes commentary from the complaints and then writes rebuttals. Steyn gleefully quotes author Martin Amis who noted that Steyn's "thoughts and themes are sane and serious - but he writes like a maniac." (p. 106). How very true - Steyn whipsaws back and forth - sometimes darkly sarcastic, sometimes sad, sometimes like a little boy who is glad to point and call names. But, throughout all of it Steyn is right - dead on 100% right. We cannot let the freedom of speech to be compromised, especially not in the name of offending the religious sensibilities of a determined few (my own religious beliefs are assaulted almost daily on sites I visit on the internet, TV and even in my classroom but I hardly am interested in shutting up those who offend me). To quote Steyn again, "What's so bad about disagreement that it needs to be turned into a crime?" (p. 182)

One of the most important books of our troubled times - as a bonus it's a joy to read!

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West

Reviewed on January 30, 2010.

American History Revised: 200 Startling Facts That Never Made It Into the Textbooks by Seymour Morris, Jr.

Published in 2010 

Written like a textbook with double columns, American History Revised is intended to be a supplement to the history your high school textbook ignored or glossed over. This is a fine goal because almost every history textbook is a dry, tedious tome that bores its readers to sleep before they can learn any history.

American History Revised approaches this challenge with a scatter-gun style of random facts that are very loosely grouped into categories like "Forgotten by History", "In Pursuit of Riches" and "Simple Mathematics, My Dear Watson." I can only imagine that those who are not already well-acquainted with history would find this jumping back and forth style quite confusing.

But, that is not the reason for my concern.

I am concerned because there are blatant untruths throughout the text. "Facts" that are not facts. Please note that I an reviewing an uncorrected proof and maybe, just maybe these items have been addressed in the text (I tried to use the Amazon peek inside feature to verify but this book does not have it enabled). But, I can tell you that when one of the reviewers who wrote a blurb in the product description above notes that "the book does more than revise American history, it reinvents it" - he was not kidding. History is reinvented with misinterpretation and misinformation.

Some examples (Note: I would normally include the page numbers but publishers don't like reviewers to do that with uncorrected proofs because those page numbers are likely to change):

He claims that Amerigo Vespucci worked for Columbus when, at most, there is plenty of evidence that Columbus and Vespucci may have only met, at most, only a few times. But, the blurb in the book was about how America got its name and the story is better if the employee steals his boss's thunder.

He claims that the United States had the world's first census. An ironic claim since he laments about our ignorance of history in the preface. Perhaps Morris is unaware of the Christmas story and the trip to Bethlehem to be counted in the census ("In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world." Luke 2:1). Or, maybe he was unaware that one of the jobs of the Roman Empire's censor (censura) was to keep up with the census - note the shared root of the words. Or, maybe he's never heard of William the Conqueror's Domesday Book - the 1086 census of his conquered territory in England - one of the foundational documents of English history and perhaps all of Western history. Ancient China and the Incas also kept census records. Ancient Egypt may have as well.

He claims the 3/5 clause of the Constitution was designed to label African Americans as less than human - 3/5 of a human being, to be exact. This is a common claim by those who have not studied the clause carefully. The clause reads, in its entirety: "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

Clearly, free African Americans were counted as whole people so Morris's premise is incorrect from the start. But, if you look at the debates, the compromise was designed to limit the number of Congressmen and electoral college votes that slave states would have. You see, slave owners wanted to count the slaves as whole people when it came to handing out proportional representation but still treat them as property. The compromise gave Southern states more representation than if they had only counted free people, but not as much as they would have had if slaves would have completely have counted towards Congressional representation and electoral votes.

Morris claims it was a case of censorship when Gore Vidal could not get a book of commentary on the War on Terror published in the United States after he'd made controversial comments about the war in Iraq. This is not a case of the government banning his book, or even of crowds threatening to burn it. It is a case of several book and magazine publishers judging the public sentiment about a known public figure and determining that the book would not make money. Or, perhaps book publishers are supposed to subsidize established authors and ignore their bottom lines?

There are plenty of nicely told nuggets of history in this book but, unless the reader knows what he or she is reading, the need to actively separate the truth from the fiction in the text makes it an undependable source at best and a source that needs independent fact-checking before being cited (which is not a bad idea anyway).

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5 and it can be found in multiple formats on Amazon.com here: American History Revised: 200 Startling Facts That Never Made It Into the Textbooks.

Reviewed May 26, 2010.