Blackstone Audio presents a new recording of this dramatically popular book. George Orwell depicts a gray, totalitarian world dominated by Big Brother and its vast network of agents, including the Thought Police, a world in which news is manufactured according to the authorities' will and people live tepid lives by rote. Winston Smith, the hero with no heroic qualities, longs only for truth and decency. But living in a social system in which privacy does not exist and where those with unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or put to death, he knows there is no hope for him. The year 1984 has come and gone, yet George Orwell's nightmare vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is still the great modern classic of negative Utopia.
Orwell's best-known work of unrelenting dystopian realism warns against totalitarianism. Reader Richard Brown's stern, didactic rendering of narrative passages successfully captures Orwell's hard-bitten cynicism. Unfortunately, Brown is less successful interpreting dialogue. He falls back too readily on stock voices: breathy heroines, smarmy villains, squealing children. Such characterizations detract markedly from the brooding tone so carefully set by the narration and break the listener's suspension of disbelief. Though Orwell's tales are allegorical, they're also deadly serious. Though his characters are bloated and distorted, they should never be played for laughs. S.J.L. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
...
Doublethink, thought police, constant surveillance, never-ending war. Although this classic dystopian novel was written in 1949, Orwell's lean prose, finely honed political discourse, and penetrating images seem as fresh, as menacing, and as disturbingly prophetic as ever. With British equanimity, Simon Prebble accentuates every shade of gray in post-Blitzed-London. As Orwell depicts the totalitarian world led by Big Brother, Prebble is especially effective at subtly changing pace and giving weight to each character's most telling moments--Winston Smith's memories of childhood, Julia's use of sex as a political act, and the interrogator, O'Brien's, calm satisfaction at breaking Winston. Offering only two crushing choices, to betray or be betrayed, 1984 remains one of the most powerful and influential masterworks of twentieth-century literature. B.P. 2008 Audies Finalist, NEA Big Read Selection (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
About the Author
George Orwell (1903-1950), the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist, essayist, and critic. He was born in India and educated at Eton. After service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, he returned to Europe to earn his living by writing and became notable for his simplicity of style and his journalistic or documentary approach to fiction.
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