1984: 75th Anniversary

One of the most important books of the 20th century.

This book is hands down one of my favorite books of all time and is truly the definition of a classic. The story can easily be applied to the world we live in today. Now as for this hardcover its just okay.. I noticed that there was a slight curvature to the front cover (picture attached), however it doesn't seem anything of concern for most part and is probably due to amazons warehouse workers being careless as usual with their handling of customers items (amazon please fix this ever growing issue) and not the result of the publisher. The dust cover is simple and gets the job done, I feel that a little more effort could have been put in for a classic such as this.. especially since its a 75th anniversary.. The paper used is nice and the words are printed clearly unlike the paperback.. which I will get to in a moment. The spacing between words makes it easy to read and is the perfect font size in my opinion. The paperback is seriously lacking in quality from pages having very faded text, poor paper choice, and very very bad binding. The pages started to separate from the binding after getting halfway through the book and was quite frustrating to see as I was incredibly careful with the book. So do yourself a favor and pay the extra for the hardcover.. you'll thank me later. Overall its a decent hardcover for the price but as always expect minor blemishes due to mishandling and disrespectful warehouse workers.

Time to read this book again If you haven’t read this book since you were required to read it in high school or college, many years or decades ago, it’s extremely worthwhile to read it again. Much has happened since you last read it. You’ve also changed you’re own perspective. I last read it in high school in 1974, but was recently motivated to read it again after reading Anne Applebaum’s fantastic book, Iron Curtain, which reconstructs, from the everyday-person’s point of view, how after WW II, the Soviet Union conquered Eastern Europe and wiped out civil society in Eastern Europe after conquering it. I’ve heard the phrase “dystopian world” used to describe this book, and I disagree. This book is a clear reaction to and comment on the Soviet takeover of it’s own country and especially Eastern Europe that was occurring while Orwell wrote. Orwell, who I just learned died young at age 46 years old, just a few years after the book came out in 1949, wrote this book in 1947 in the middle of that take over, and it is interesting to read it again, 75 years later, to hear Orwell’s thoughts on what was occurring, as it was occurring anew. As I am writing this in 2023, Russia is trying to wipe out Ukrainian culture, saying it never was a country, systematically bombing its museums and cultural buildings and television towers, forcing residents to use Russian money and passports, and forcing schools in Ukraine to only use the Russian language and Russian textbooks. The Wagner group story in Russian is being changed. In Russia there isn’t a television screen in everyone’s home, like a bathroom mirror, as depicted in the book, but, not too far off the mark, everyone is on the internet, and the Russian thought police certainly monitors what people type and post. I do have to say that for the last few hours of the book, I just waited to get it done with…the extended torture scenes where Orwell shows us how torturing Winston brainwashes him, the long appendix where the narrator goes over the 1984 dictionary, the idea of a permanent war with minimal true destruction as a way of controlling the population. I thought it was interesting that the book is premised on a nuclear war happening in the 1950’s, and the world being broken up into Russian, USA/British, and China spheres of influence—-actually not too far from where we are now, minus the nuclear war, assuming Ukraine doesn’t heat up. It is interesting that Russia has survived as a thought-controlling type of government. This was likely all new when Orwell wrote 1984 back in 1947. Lastly, as I am a lot more experienced compared with when I read this book in high school in 1974, I can now appreciate Orwell’s severe sarcasm. Orwell is not quite funny, but very frequently I found myself smirking and shaking my head. I did the audiobook, and Simon Prebble did well. As a parting thought, in our capitalist society our every thought is monitored by companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, and then sold and used to make money and manipulate what we do and think. Much of this information is also searchable by our own government under search warrant. Congressional hearings about this are currently underway. Don’t mistake me, I’m far from saying anything positive about Russia, but just saying….

Great book!! No spoilers, but it really makes you think about following the system and consequences of not.

" ' How is the dictionary getting on?' Said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise. 'Slowly,' said Syme. "I'm on the abjectives. It's fascinating.' He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak ... 'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. ' We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a singe word that will become obsolete before the year 2050 ... 'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words' ... 'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.' " - George Orwell, '1984' "Logic, therefore, as the science thought, or the science of the process of pure reason, should be capable of being constructed a priori." -Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy ("a priori" is defined as deduced from self-evident premises) By revealing the concept of "Newspeak" in his great dystopian novel '1984', George Orwell, while dying of tuberculosis, cryptically attempted to expose to the world one of the great crimes of government against humanity; the systematic suppression/subversion of essential tools of reasoning; both in language and science. Central to this crime is the deliberate suppression of the science of formal logic. (Formal logic, invented by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., is the science of evaluating arguments in order to determine if they are correctly reasoned. ) I will fully explain. You see, the masses haven't been taught formal logic by State controlled public schools or media for many generations. (In his book ' The Underground History of American Education' John Taylor Gatto informs his readers that this deliberate dumbing down of the population through State controlled schools was adopted nationwide just after the completion of the U.S. Civil War.) Don't believe me? Just go out and ask some average U.S. adults how to determine if a deductive argument is both valid and sound; or the difference between a formal and an informal logical fallacy. (Both are very basic and essential knowledge of formal logic.) You'll find that not one in twenty have any idea. This is not an accident. The terrible and murderous lies of our governments rely upon the masses being misinformed, ignorant, and intellectually crippled. And our State controlled schools and media have done this job very well, I'm sorry to say. "Ignorance is strength."-George Orwell, 1984 The list of criminal conspiracies, committed by the oligarchs who control our governments, are difficult for most people to psychologically accept. They include the subversion of free systems of government, fraud, illegal war, and genocide on an almost unimaginable scale. Here are a few for which the available evidence is simply overwhelming: (1) Arab terrorists did not carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001. (2) Man never walked on the moon. (3) HIV does not, and never did cause AIDS, and our governments have always been aware of this fact. (4) JFK was not murdered by a lone assassin. (5) The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which justified U.S. entry into the Vietnam War was a hoax. (6) The homicidal cyanide gas chambers of the holocaust are a fraud, devised by the Allies to dehumanize the German enemy, and generate support for the people and state of Israel. The Germans never murdered anyone with cyanide gas. There are many, many more bloody lies, as you will see, if only you will accept George Orwell' s invitation to finally become conscious. "If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within... But the proles, if only somehow they could become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet--!" -George Orwell, 1984 ------------------------------------------------------- Here are few quote/definitions regarding formal logic that I hope you will find useful. "Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong." -Thomas Jefferson "We ought in fairness to fight our case with no help beyond the bare facts: nothing, therefore, should matter except the proof of those facts." -Aristotle, Rhetoric "The truth or falsity of a statement depends on facts, not on any power on the part of the statement itself of admitting contrary qualities". -Aristotle, Categories "We suppose ourselves to posses unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing, as opposed to knowing it in the accidental way in which the sophist knows, when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other, and further, that the fact could not be other than it is" -Aristotle, Posterior Analytics "The province of Logic must be restricted to that portion of our knowledge which consists of inferences from truths previously known; whether those antecedent data be general propositions, or particular observations and perceptions. Logic is not the science of Belief, but the science of Proof, or Evidence. In so far as belief professes to be founded on proof, the office of Logic is to supply a test for ascertaining whether or not the belief is well grounded." -John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1843) "Fallacious reasoning is just the opposite of what can be called cogent reasoning. We reason cogently when we reason (1) validly; (2) from premises well supported by evidence; and (3) using all relevant evidence we know of. The purpose of avoiding fallacious reasoning is, of course, to increase our chances of reasoning cogently." -Howard Kahane, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric, 1976, second edition "The fallacy of suppressed evidence is committed when an arguer ignores evidence that would tend to undermine the premises of an otherwise good argument, causing it to be unsound or uncogent. Suppressed evidence is a fallacy of presumption and is closely related to begging the question. As such, it's occurrence does not affect the relationship between premises and conclusion but rather the alleged truth of premises. The fallacy consists in passing off what are at best half-truths as if they were whole truths, thus making what is actually a defective argument appear to be good. The fallacy is especially common among arguers who have a vested interest in the situation ttho which the argument pertains." -Patrick Hurley, A Concise Introduction to Logic (1985) "Aristotle devides all conclusions into logical and dialectical, in the manner described, and then into eristical. (3) Eristic is the method by which the form of the conclusion is correct, but the premises, the material from which it is drawn, are not true, but only appear to be true. Finally (4) sophistic is the method in which the form of the conclusion is false, although it seems correct. These three last properly belong to the art of Controversial Dialectic, as they have no objective truth in view, but only the appearance of it, and pay no regard to truth itself; that is to say, they aim at victory." -Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy "The hypothesis most likely to prove right must do the following: 1. Include all known facts; 2. Not over-emphasize any part of the evidence at the expense of the rest; 3. Observe the laws of probability as established by previous investigation; 4. Avoid logical contradictions; 5. Stay as simple as possible without ignoring any part of the evidence. Hypotheses which violate any one of these requirements are Forced Hypotheses." -James Johnson, Logic and Rhetoric (1968) "This is the argumentum ad verecundiam. It consists in making an appeal to authority rather than reason, and in using such an authority as may suit the degree of knowledge possessed by your opponent. Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment, says Seneca; and it is therefore an easy matter if you have an authority on your side which your opponent respects. The more limited his capacity and knowledge, the greater is the number of authorities who weigh with him. But if his capacity and knowledge are of a high order, there are very few; indeed, hardly any at all. He may, perhaps, admit the authority of professional men versed in science or an art or a handicraft of which he knows little or nothing; but even so he will regard it with suspicion. Contrarily, ordinary folk have a deep respect for professional men of every kind. They are unaware that a man who makes a profession of a thing loves it not for the thing itself, but for the money he makes by it; or that it is rare for a man who teaches to know his subject thoroughly; for if he studies it as he ought, he has in most cases no time left in which to teach it... There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted. Example effects their thought just as it affects their action. They are like sheep following the bell-wether just as he leads them. They will sooner die than think. It is very curious that the universality of an opinion should have so much weight with people, as their own experience might tell them that it's acceptance is an entirely thoughtless and merely imitative process. But it tells them nothing of the kind, because they possess no self-knowledge whatever... When we come to look into the matter, so-called universal opinion is the opinion of two or three persons; and we should be persuaded of this if we could see the way in which it really arises. We should find that it is two or three persons who, in the first instance, accepted it, or advanced and maintained it; and of whom people were so good as to believe that they had thoroughly tested it. Then a few other persons, persuaded beforehand that the first were men of the requisite capacity, also accepted the opinion. These, again, were trusted by many others, whose laziness suggested to them that it was better to believe at once, than to go through the troublesome task of testing the matter for themselves. Thus the number of these lazy and credulous adherents grew from day to day; for the opinion had no sooner obtained a fair measure of support than its further supporters attributed this to the fact that the opinion could only have obtained it by the cogency of its arguments. The remainder were then compelled to grant what was universally granted, so as not to pass for unruly persons who resisted opinions which everyone accepted, or pert fellows who thought themselves cleverer than any one else. When opinion reaches this stage, adhesion becomes a duty; and henceforward the few who are capable of forming a judgment hold their peace. Those who venture to speak are such as are entirely incapable of forming any opinion or any judgment of their own, being merely the echo of others' opinions; and, nevertheless, they defend them with all the greater zeal and intolerance. For what they hate in people who think differently is not so much the different opinions which they profess, as the presumption of wanting to form their own judgment; a presumption of which they themselves are never guilty, as they are very well aware. In short, there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself? Since this is what happens, where is the value of the opinion even of a hundred millions? It is no more established than an historical fact reported by a hundred chroniclers who can be proved to have plagiarised it from one another; the opinion in the end being traceable to a single individual." -Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy (1831)

Super book

Great book, a must read! The cover really fits with the theme of the book and looks great on the shelf

All in order.

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Chegou atrasado, mas chegou. O livro é perfeito. Esse livro é excelente para quem está aprendendo inglês.