George Orwell Books

This hefty paperback tome is an excellent addition to any library for the wealth of Anglo-American classics contained within. Here we get the great modern war stories along with cultural classics like the infamous article where John Lennon is quoted as saying the Beatles are more famous than Jesus. Many journalism collections are just dreary and dusty old collections, but the selection here is mostly enjoyable and sometimes truly great. I'd recommend this book to fellow journalists and to history buffs alike. The main trouble with the collection is its narrow casting - it is Anglo-American to the core. For this collection to be truly great - and truly a compendium of journalism - it'd need some great African voices like the column South African activist Steve Biko wrote under the byline "Frank Talk" that broke that county's censorship rules to tell the truth about apartheid. There must be other examples from around the world, but this collection is mostly an Atlantic cup of tea.

But a remarkably flavorful cup of tea at that.

This book has an incredible cast of writers: Hemingway, Dickens, Orwell, Churchill etc. However, if you are not a big fan of war reportage, you may want to look elsewhere. The majority of these articles are war related and although they are very well written, war is not a topic I find very interesting. Still, there a number of fascinating pieces of journalism, like the one about the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, and Dickens piece on a guillotine execution in a town square. It's worth a read but I would have liked to see more of a variety in topics.

To be quite frank, I did not enjoy this book.

Not only did I not like the way it's written, but I didn't like what I was reading either.

Firstly, his research is impeccable, but it was so hard to know who anybody was in this book, he just pops up random characters left and right, and he'll just casually mention cousins and neighbours and you are expected to remember them all.

I think it's because he spent so long researching the stuff that he just has everybody memorized, but for a reader remembering casual friends and stuff like that by last name when they haven't been mentioned for 150 pages is hard.

He also mentions Orwell's father's death as an afterthought.
He has chapters about the most mundane stuff, and he mentions Orwell's father being sick many times.
But then he changes the subject and you are wondering whatever happened to his father.
Then you read another 20 pages and he mentions it while talking about something else.

Furthermore, after reading nearly 500 pages on this man's life, you begin to view the book as written for the purpose of revealing his dark nature.
Orwell's eccentricity and lack of social tact are basically what the book is about.

The back of the book jacket reads, "Taylor's magisterial assessment cuts through Orwell's iconic status to reveal a bitter critic who concealed a profound totalitarian streak and whose progress through the literary world of the 30s and 40s was characterized by the myths he built around himself."

Taylor writes the book to convince us that Orwell was a creepy poor man with an unhappy marriage, a womanizer and pitifully helpless father.
Then you remember the magisterial books that the man produced, and you realize that nothing in this portrayal of the man gives any indication of greatness or of the material he ended up producing.
The sole convincing argument was that 1984 was so gloomy because of the tortuous state the author himself was in when he wrote it.
I would give it 2 stars if I felt that the research was poor, but the author does display his knowledge of Orwell's works several times.
Towards the end he even mentions a few specific scenes and passages from the 1984 that appeared in Orwell's earlier writing. He has clearly pored over the hordes of work Orwell produced.

Pros:

Very well researched.
The photographs included are a great help in visualizing the people in his life.

Cons:

Disjointed, disorganized, haphazard writing. More than once he is making an argument, only to digress and be sidetracked for several pages. Then he continues his argument out of the blue and you are reminded, "Ah, that's what he was talking about."

Seems to write for the purpose of debunking Orwell's mythological status, which would be fine, but it makes for a very poor first read into the man's life.

So, if you are not an Orwell fan, and would like to read a dissertation on the man's darker side, then this book is for you.
However, if you are looking for your first biography on the man who produced utter genius like 1984 and Animal Farm, then I would suggest you start with something else.

B-

Well, I guess idols routinely crumble under scrutiny, so I shouldn't really be surprised that I came away from D.J. Taylor's biography of George Orwell viewing the famous author more as a man than as a hero. That is how it must be, however. When we study our fellow humans their flaws become discernible regardless of their greatness. As a man, Eric Blair was far from grand. He appeared to have the same faults present in many writers (all-be-they to a lesser extent). I now have a better appreciation of the author, and for the suffering he went through along with the challenges of his life. My one complaint is that Taylor did not treat his subject with the respect to which he was entitled. More empathy and less Thackeray would have been immensely appreciated. As for me, I'll always treasure 1984, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Hitchens was right; Orwell remains relevant. This biography heightens our awareness of the man even though it comes at the cost of his no longer seeming transcendent. Orwell's creative genius is not something undermined by these pages, but I do think that it's hard to appreciate his political outlook after closely examining it. His animosity towards Marxism is rather comical when one considers his continuing, quasi-religious belief in socialism. His time at the BBC taught him a little bit about the way in which bureaucracies function and we can only hopefully speculate that, if he had lived longer, he would have eventually renounced his love for statism and seen the light.

Well, I guess idols routinely crumble under scrutiny, so I shouldn't really be surprised that I came away from D.J. Taylor's biography of George Orwell viewing the famous author more as a man than as a hero. That is how it must be, however. When we study our fellow humans their flaws become discernible regardless of their greatness. As a man, Eric Blair was far from grand. He appeared to have the same faults present in many writers (all-be-they to a lesser extent). I now have a better appreciation of the author, and for the suffering he went through along with the challenges of his life. My one complaint is that Taylor did not treat his subject with the respect to which he was entitled. More empathy and less Thackeray would have been immensely appreciated. As for me, I'll always treasure 1984, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Hitchens was right; Orwell remains relevant. This biography heightens our awareness of the man even though it comes at the cost of his no longer seeming transcendent. Orwell's creative genius is not something undermined by these pages, but I do think that it's hard to appreciate his political outlook after closely examining it. His animosity towards Marxism is rather comical when one considers his continuing, quasi-religious belief in socialism. His time at the BBC taught him a little bit about the way in which bureaucracies function and we can only hopefully speculate that, if he had lived longer, he would have eventually renounced his love for statism and seen the light.

I have read many biographies of Orwell before encountering this one, but have learned more about Orwell the person in this book than in all of the others combined. Taylor's insight into the man and sparkling prose style make this a must read.

This is a difficult book to categorize. It is well written, contains many interesting anecdotes, but it misses the essential Orwell.

Taylor's gloomy, otherwordly, ex-Etonian, ex-imperial policeman simply does not add up to Orwell. The sum of the parts is much less than the man. Taylor's book is a bit like an autopsy, the pathologist clearly never being able to comprehend the stiff, dead flesh and bottled samples before him as the full human being they were. Nevertheless, autopsies do tell interesting tales.

Orwell's gloomy temperament puts him not outside the mainstream of writers but exactly in the company of so many important writers. The list of writers with some form of depression, whether alcoholism or gloominess, is so huge - Greene, Swift, Hemingway, Le Carré, Dickens, Gissing, O'Neill, Twain, Faulkner, etc, etc. - one comes to think of the quality almost as a job requirement. It provides one of the special lens through which critical writers see the world. One has to believe Taylor understands this, but his book conveys only clinical observations of gloominess snipped from letters, diaries, and conversations.

As far as Orwell's otherworldliness, Orwell was clearly in the great tradition of English eccentrics, and that is an important component of his appeal. There is a long and glorious line of them from Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen down to Alec Guinness, Margaret Rutherford, and Vanessa Redgrave. Yet Taylor only offers clinical observations and never puts them in their proper context.

Orwell was not an important novelist, so it seems a bit gratuitous to say so as Taylor does. In fact, he wasn't even a very good novelist. Yet books like Keep the Aspadistra Flying do provide a keen sense of his Englishness. Missing entirely from Taylor's autopsy is a sense of Orwell's quintessential Englishness. When Orwell writes of getting back to the feel of heavy English coins and having mahogany tea, readers get a sense of pure distilled Englishness. This comes through also in quasi-journalistic books like The Road to Wigan Pier or Down and Out in Paris and London - important early efforts at what today might be called investigative journalism - books which Taylor rather disparages both in terms of Orwell's re-arranging actual events and being an observer mentally wearing an Eton tie.

What Orwell was is a critic, and a rather magnificent one. I am reminded of Degas' description of Monet as "Only an eye, but what an eye!"

Orwell had an exquisite sense of justice and a very sensitive barometer for tyranny plus he had the words to convey vividly his sensibilities. Taylor virtually misses this in his examination of bile and stool samples. Taylor too often puts Orwell's political criticism down to miss-directed, soft-Left thinking of an ex-Etonian. Orwell himself recognized the simpering nature of much of the Left's views, yet he struggled bravely with finding a vocabulary to accommodate his sympathies. He possibly did not come to recognize himself for what he was, a scorching critic of both Left and Right. After all, his time was short. That is how it is when you die in your forties.

He was also an important literary critic, and while Taylor recognizes this, I don't believe he gives it a full enough examination.

Taylor sadly drags out the subject of anti-Semitism, perhaps the most overly-used epithet of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If Orwell was anti-Semitic - and I do not believe this for a second - it was in the same vague sense of virtually all Englishmen of his time. The English have always had a degree of xenophobia, a quality whose obverse side is the very set of qualities defining Englishness. I am tired of discussions of whether Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice makes the greatest playwright in human history anti-Semitic, discussions which always ignore the human qualities and sense of justice Shakespeare gives his character, and just so, Orwell, overall a truly decent man.

There has been a good deal of writing in recent years about Orwell, much of it wrong-headed, from claims being made that he would have supported Bush's invasion of Iraq (!) to sentimentality. Little of it captures Orwell the independent and remarkably clear-thinking critic. Taylor gives us no sense of what it was that animated Orwell, other than some almost silly stuff about getting back at people like the headmistress of his school. There is almost a sense in this book of a high-class hatchet job done on Orwell, but I don't want to push that point. What makes Orwell truly important is minimized, and what wasn't important is given a good deal of weight. Perhaps that is the fate of great critics who support no one's ideologies and preconceptions.

This book should be read only with an awareness of its limited approach to the subject. This is not Orwell, but a somewhat interesting display of bits and memorabilia in museum cabinets.

Please see my review of Gordon Bowker's Orwell biography, a superior work (published in the same year) in most respects to Taylor's.

I must be getting old. Why would I choose to read this book? But I did. Not only that! I recognize all the people it refers to and the comments about the works of GO strike me as just the sort of reaction I would have myself! It makes me want to know how old Harold Bloom is. Perhaps I am becoming too familiar with Harold Bloom and I am beginning to think as he teaches me! If so, who are the THOUGHT POLICE? Harold?

This is Orwell reconsidered and it rings true. It even has me thinking about reading some of GO's things again.

The words (Planeta Cero) kept bothering me. Thought it was the publisher. I just found out, too late..after it shipped, this book is printed in Spanish, not English. If the language is not English, it should be stated clearly on the main line near the title.

Nowhere does it say this book is in Spanish. This was not what we wanted and was no way made clear that it wasn't in English like the other several books we ordered. We paid return shipping and still have seen no balance refund. We order alot from Amazon but this transaction was not fair.

1984 is extremely influential on the way we as a society label each other and our government with names such as "Big Brother" Orwellian and such. These names like calling someone a Nazi allow us to appear to argue but actually allow us to dodge the real issues. This is fairly ironic considering the origin of such terms. Basically 1984 is set in London in the distopian future. Orwell wrote it in response to Stalin's corrupting the ideals of Socialism. He was a socialist and so was really bothered by that failure.

The plot to 1984 isn't so important as the setting. Basically the story follows Winston Smith. Smith harbors less than perfect views of his environment, for which he will one day be arrested regardless of his actions. Not loving the government (thought crime) is the only crime that is recognized. Hidden cameras and microphones are omnipresent in the city, included mandatory TVs which can't be turned off, only show a single government station and contain hidden cameras through which "thought police" may monitor what is in front of the TV at any time. Social interaction doesn't exist, since that would be considered weird and therefore criminal.

There are three classes of people in London: Inner Party members, Party members like Winston and the proletariate, who aren't watched so closely because they aren't considered human. In this world Winston goes from merely not liking the government to engaging in unusual behavior. He starts by buying decorative antiques at a proletariate shop and progresses to having a girl friend, who he can only meet with in remote country side settings on account of social interaction is not allowed by the government. It is obvious to him that he will one day be taken to the Ministry of Love, a windowless building which handles law enforcement, and never fails at getting thought criminals to love the government.

The novel is always dark. No happy beginning, no happy middle and no happy ending. Still it is important to read it before throwing around terms like "Orwellian" It has been so influential on society that it is required reading - if you want to pass your tenth grade English. Failing to read is a sign of insurgence against the government.

Was expecting full version and had to send it back. Was charged more for shipping then what I paid for book

This is not an audio book of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, though perhaps I was the fool to think it was. Based on the title of the listing itself, I'd be surprised if the seller wasn't counting on idiots like me to purchase it from him.

I was desperately seeking an affordable audio version of the book to use in my high school classroom as an adaptation for a student who had a medical problem and could not physically read the book. So, now perhaps you can understand my dismay at receiving a CD-RW copy of an old radio play...needless to say, I am out a few dollars, and my student is further behind than she was earlier.

On the flip side, if you ARE looking for a copy of this Radio play from 1953, by all means purchase it and write a review of its contents.

The book I ordered was categorized under the wrong volume and it was incorrectly described as being in VERY good condition despite that it was a VERY old, worn copy with discolored pages, words missing, and torn pages. I was very displeased with this purchase and will not be using this seller in the future. In addition they refused to answer my emails regarding a refund, which left me no other choice but to file with AMAZON who forced them to issue the refund! Stay away from this seller, it's just a headache waiting to happen!!