Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780007181704
Format: Special Edition
ISBN number: 0007181701
Label: HarperVoyager
Manufacturer: HarperVoyager
Page Count: 192
Printing Date: August 02, 2004
Publishing house: HarperVoyager
Sale Popularity Level: 534956
Studio: HarperVoyager
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books. The classic novel of a post-literate future, 'Fahrenheit 451' stands alongside Orwell's '1984' and Huxley's 'Brave New World' as a prophetic account of Western civilization's enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity. Bradbury's powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which over fifty years from very first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.
Amazon.com Review:
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
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Rated by buyers -
I don't want to think how many years ago I very first read Fahrenheit 451, but it must've been around the same time (1966) that Truffault came out with his horrible cinematic version of the novel. I know this because I remember being unimpressed with both versions (although the movie may've soured me on the book).
Re-reading the novel now, I still don't think that it ranks up there with, say, Huxley's Brave New World. But it is an astoundingly prescient vision of the sort of society in which we live: one in which cultural memory and tradition is increasingly replaced by immediate kitsch, in which media is entertainment, reading is a dying practice, immediate gratification the norm, jadedness a perennial hazard, and never-ending war a reality. Social commentators such as Morris Berman and Susan Jacoby have argued for a kind of secular monkdom to try to preserve and pass on the tradition that's quickly sinking beneath the new dark age that's descending, and this isn't at all unlike the anonymous book-memorizing preservers in Fahrenheit 451's moribund society.
What does it mean when a culture loses its depth, its memory, its lineage? What does it mean when an entire society is unable, as the character Granger recommends to Montag, to "stuff [its] eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds" (p. 140) because it's far too occupied with commerce and kitsch? Bradbury's dystopia invites us to ask ourselves these sorts of questions. We ignore them at our peril.
Rated by buyers 
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I can see why so many people like the works of Ray Bradbury. He is a very effective story teller, he has a particular talent for building vivid imagery with few words (his "less is more" style is DEFINITELY a winner) and he is able to take very important, very relevent modern themes and inject them into his stories. In this story, we see how Bradbury has taken aim at the world of electronic media as an advancement that very well may, over time, become the downfall of mankind.
So why did I only give him three stars? Two reasons: (1) While Bradbury is long on imagery, in this book he's short on character development. It works well with the protagonist's wife because Bradbury created her to be shallow and indifferent, but what about the young neighbor girl who was so intriguing and just disappeared one day, with no explanation at all? As for the protagonist and his "boss," their characters weren't developed to the point where I cared for them either way. In order for a novel-length story to be a good one, you have to have at least one character that you identify with or get emotionally attached to, and that doesn't happen here. (2) As in "The Martian Chronicles," Bradbury puts his dystopian society to an end by dropping the big bomb on it, leaving the small band of survivors to go on to -- what? Sorry; end of story. Makes me wonder if Patricia Cornwall was schooled in the not-so-fine art of ending books by Bradbury...
Rated by buyers 
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A science fiction thriller. A true masterpiece that will blow you away. Although it's a science fiction book, it has some frighening resemblances to our own world. I could easily see this world turning onto the thoughtless "utopia" described by Ray Bradbury.
The government tries to keep everyone happy in the process of no self thought and the burning of things that would cause debate and conflict, such as books. Now that houses are completely fireproof, the firemen no longer need to stop fires. Instead, the have a new job: to burn books.
I liked this book because it kept me wanting it to keep reading and reading to the end. It was even hard for me to go to sleep some nights I was reading it. All in all it was a great book about one of the "bad guys", a fireman, who stood up agains the grasp of a corrupt society.
Rated by buyers -
I do not want to tell much of the story, as the unfolding is part of the intrigue. However now that houses are fire proof the purpose of firemen is performing a service by burning books to maintain the happy social order.
Naturally one fireman goes awry after several emotional incidences from someone burning up with the books to a young neighbor with strange ways, which run counter to his carrier. This leads to all kinds of deviant things like reading. What are you doing now?
One big rift between the book and the movie [Fahrenheit 451 (1966) -- Oscar Werner, Julie Christie] is that in the movie the "written word" was completely removed (even from the credits); where as in the book the state was against was literature and not technical writing.
Books are just symbols of ideas that could have been on the screen also. There is deference between training and education. Among other reasons the book was a symbol of one mans superiority over another in a world of equals.
Fahrenheit 451
Rated by buyers -
True Fiction
Though this book [Faremhieght 451] is a piece science fiction, it relates in its own little ways to the way the world is today. I, for one, can see this world of ours turning into a world with the same basis and same ideals that make up this book Farenhieght 451; a world which trys to keep everyone happy and careless about everything to the point of making people seemingly mindless, and in the process of doing so they destroy everything that brings people feeling and a individual way of thinking. Farenhieght 451 is a must read for anyone who likes a good philosophical novel.
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