George Orwell's prophetic, nightmarish vision of "Negative Utopia" is timelier than ever-and its warnings more powerful.

Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written.

I'm really glad I saw this book in my ma's house and decided to grab it for a vacation. It was a great summer read and it kept me intrigued the whole time.

This book is "about totalitarianism" and "about socialism" in the same way that "Star Wars" is about combat spaceships or "The Matrix" is about computer technology. If you read the book it becomes quite clear that the totalitarian regime depicted bears no resemblance whatsoever to socialism (it's the opposite, a totalitarian oligarchy), so when people say this book is a warning against socialism they are revealing their own practice of doublethink and so the warning of this book becomes even more important. "1984" is about the ways in which the human mind can become silently (and forcibly) stolen from an individual, and therefore from the masses, through manipulation of media, perception of scarcity, scapegoat-targetted engagement of strong emotions, and anti-intellectualism, among other things. All of these influences exist in our Western world, not merely in Stalin's Russia or National Socialist (Nazi) Germany of the past. The afterword by Erich Fromm should also be required reading. I wish I could find this edition (with that afterword) in hardcover form.

When I received my book in the mail, at first I was happy because it arrived early. After opening the book, I discovered it started on page 61. The First 60 pages were missing. I am extremely unsatisfied with my purchase.

I want to address the people who rated this book low because it is just a warning about communism or socialism, and people who rate it high for the same reason. There are many aspects to this book, and one of them is that Orwell is warning anyone who wants to go extreme socialism that you can never get rid of the upper class type people, because even if you get rid of all the upper class, there are still going to be people in the middle class who want to be upper class, and see the revolution as their chance to gain power, or make things equal between them and those in power. They don't want equality with the lower class, because they have nothing to gain from a society where everyone is middle class. This book helps revolutions, by warning them to be on the lookout for anyone trying to take power for themselves in the new government. It needs to be democratic in order to control those people. Orwell accepts it as inevitable that these people will always exist. The power hungry in America are mostly controlled by competitive elections, although having candidates that are similar defeats the purpose sometimes.

If you read Nineteen Eighty-Four trying to see where the author or right or wrong about the future, it will be disappointing -- as most books of this kind are. Obviously, the book was written in a whole different political context. However, if you go past all that you'll see that the book is really about the human nature -- our way of keeping all this contrary to our interests under surveillance, then control, and perhaps our tendency to eliminate them. I liked the book very much.