Brave New World (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
What do you see when you think of technology? Do you see perhaps the clean, pristine surfaces of the Apple store, the minimalist color scheme and architectural sensibility? What does it suggest? Efficiency, right? Cleanliness, sleekness. What do we associate efficiency and cleanliness with in our society? Progress, innovation. Unfortunately if we try and apply the same standards to all areas of human life, it clashes with many of our most basic drives and instincts. So if you establish this as our ends, the means would be to condition the human out of humankind. And at the end of this you are simply left with civilization, a well-oiled machine, smoothly running. This is the future Huxley presents in this book; it's bleak, it's depressing, but most of all it's frighteningly real. With all this renewed attention on Orwell's dystopia, maybe it's time to reexamine Huxley, who presented a culture defined by it's goals and values, inundated by pleasure and entertainment, the tools of technologies they didn't understand rather than their masters. After all, at one time entertainment technology gave us reality-TV stars, now it would seem it gives us leaders from the self-same source. Yes, maybe it's time to give Huxley another look. — From Salvatore's Picks
Description
Now more than ever: Aldous Huxley's enduring masterwork must be read and understood by anyone concerned with preserving the human spirit
"A masterpiece. . . . One of the most prophetic dystopian works." —Wall Street Journal
Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order—all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine” (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization.
Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as a thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New World likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.
About the Author
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) is the author of the classic novels Brave New World, Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles, California.
Praise For…
“[A] masterpiece. ... One of the most prophetic dystopian works of the 20th century.” — Wall Street Journal
“As sparkling, as provocative, as brilliant...as the day it was published.” — Martin Green
“One of the 20th century’s greatest writers.” — Washington Post
“Chilling. . . . That he gave us the dark side of genetic engineering in 1932 is amazing.” — Providence Journal-Bulletin
“A genius . . . a writer who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine.” — The New Yorker
“Aldous Huxley is the greatest 20th century writer in English.” — Chicago Tribune
“Huxley uses his erudite knowledge of human relations to compare our actual world with his prophetic fantasy of 1931. It is a frightening experience, indeed, to discover how much of his satirical prediction of a distant future became reality in so short a time.” — New York Times Book Review
“A sometimes appallingly accurate view of today’s world.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“It’s time for everyone to read or reread Brave New World.” — Raleigh News & Observer