1984 george orwell book review

Read TIME’s Original Review of <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i>

Read TIME’s Original Review of Nineteen Eighty-Four

G eorge Orwell was already an established literary star when his masterwork Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on this day in 1949, but that didn’t stop TIME’s reviewer from being pleasantly surprised by the book. After all, even the expectation that a book would be good doesn’t mean one can’t be impressed when it turns out to be, as TIME put it, “absolutely super.”

One of the reasons, the review suggested, was Orwell’s bet that his fictional dystopia would not actually seem so foreign to contemporary readers. They would easily recognize many elements of the fictional world that TIME summed up as such:

In Britain 1984 A.D., no one would have suspected that Winston and Julia were capable of crimethink (dangerous thoughts) or a secret desire for ownlife (individualism). After all, Party-Member Winston Smith was one of the Ministry of Truth’s most trusted forgers; he had always flung himself heart & soul into the falsification of government statistics. And Party-Member Julia was outwardly so goodthinkful (naturally orthodox) that, after a brilliant girlhood in the Spies, she became active in the Junior Anti-Sex League and was snapped up by Pornosec, a subsection of the government Fiction Department that ground out happy-making pornography for the masses. In short, the grim, grey London Times could not have been referring to Winston and Julia when it snorted contemptuously: “Old-thinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc,” i.e., “Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.” How Winston and Julia rebelled, fell in love and paid the penalty in the terroristic world of tomorrow is the thread on which Britain’s George Orwell has spun his latest and finest work of fiction. In Animal Farm (TIME, Feb. 4, 1946,) Orwell parodied the Communist system in terms of barnyard satire; but in 1984 … there is not a smile or a jest that does not add bitterness to Orwell’s utterly depressing vision of what the world may be in 35 years’ time.

Decades later, as the real-life 1984 approached, TIME dedicated a cover story to Orwell’s earlier vision of what that year could have been like. “That Year Is Almost Here,” the headline proclaimed . But obsessing over how it matched up to its fictional depiction was missing the point, the article posited. “The proper way to remember George Orwell, finally, is not as a man of numbers—1984 will pass, not Nineteen Eighty–Four—but as a man of letters,” wrote Paul Gray, “who wanted to change the world by changing the word.”

Read the full 1949 review, here in the TIME Vault: Where the Rainbow Ends

LIST: The 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time

More Must-Reads from TIME

How Kamala Harris Knocked Donald Trump Off Course
Introducing TIME's 2024 Latino Leaders
What Makes a Friendship Last Forever?
33 True Crime Documentaries That Shaped the Genre
Long COVID Looks Different in Kids
Your Questions About Early Voting , Answered
Column: Your Cynicism Isn’t Helping Anybody
The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2024

Write to Lily Rothman at [email protected]

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

For Parents
For Educators
Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

Movie Reviews
Best Movie Lists
Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best TV Lists
Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
Common Sense Selections for TV
Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

Book Reviews
Best Book Lists
Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Game Reviews
Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Podcast Reviews
Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

App Reviews
Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

YouTube Channel Reviews
YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

How to Help Kids Build Character Strengths with Quality Media

Family Tech Planners
Digital Skills
All Articles
Latino Culture
Black Voices
Asian Stories
Native Narratives
LGBTQ+ Pride
Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 23 Reviews
Kids Say 79 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Classic dystopian novel about life under constant scrutiny.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that 1984 presents an unblinking portrait of life lived under constant surveillance and stands as one of the great dystopian satires of the 20th century. Author George Orwell also wrote Animal Farm , a satirical allegory about the abuse of power.

Why Age 16+?

Oceania exists in a constant state of war, so violence is a daily part of life.

Winston Smith and his younger lover, Julia, engage in an illicit sexual relation

Members of the Party are encouraged to smoke Victory cigarettes and Victory gin,

Citizens of Oceania are forbidden from using objectionable language, but a few "

Any Positive Content?

George Orwell's 1984 is one of the most influential satires of the 20th century.

Despite his failings, Winston Smith finds the courage to keep a diary, take a lo

The protagonist, Winston Smith, has been beaten down by decades under the all-se

Violence & Scariness

Oceania exists in a constant state of war, so violence is a daily part of life. Bombs rain from the sky. Disgraced members of the Party are executed for their supposed crimes. Worse is the emotional violence inflicted upon a populace constantly under surveillance and forced to report the slightest infraction. Winston Smith is tortured in the Ministry of Love, in scenes that are physically wrenching, but there are still worse things that await him in Room 101.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Winston Smith and his younger lover, Julia, engage in an illicit sexual relationship, presumably away from the attentions of Big Brother. The description of their lovemaking is not explicit, but there is no doubt that theirs is a thoroughly adult, physical relationship.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Members of the Party are encouraged to smoke Victory cigarettes and Victory gin, but no one really seems to enjoy them. The poverty-stricken Proles partake in alcohol consumption as a form of "entertainment" provided by the Party.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Citizens of Oceania are forbidden from using objectionable language, but a few "hells" and "damns" slip out.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Educational Value

George Orwell's 1984 is one of the most influential satires of the 20th century. Its vocabulary has become part of everyday discourse, from "Big Brother" to "Thought Police" to "doublethink." Its themes remain especially relevant at a time of when personal privacy is at a premium and when governments large and small manipulate language to promote their own particular ends.

Positive Messages

Despite his failings, Winston Smith finds the courage to keep a diary, take a lover, and think of working to overthrow the Party and Big Brother.

Positive Role Models

The protagonist, Winston Smith, has been beaten down by decades under the all-seeing eye of Big Brother. Nevertheless, he finds the courage for small acts of rebellion. As he begins to take bigger risks, he becomes more likeable, until the reader is rooting for him against all odds.

Where to Read

Parent and kid reviews.

Parents say (23)
Kids say (79)

Based on 23 parent reviews

Theme of Sexual Freedom

What's the story.

In a dystopian future where nuclear war has divided the world into three repressive superstates, middle-aged Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in the superstate of Oceania, in the city called Airstrip One (formerly London). He has no hope of escaping the watchful eye of Big Brother until he meets Julia, a younger woman who persuades him to sneak away with her and become her illicit lover. Even though he knows they will be caught, Smith cannot imagine what awaits him once he is captured and taken to the Ministry of Love for interrogation.

Is It Any Good?

Narrated with infinite precision, 1984 is one of the most famous dystopian satires in the English language. Its vocabulary -- "doublethink," "Big Brother," "down the Memory Hole," "Thought Police," "unperson" -- has become part of popular culture. Winston Smith's quest for freedom under the gaze of all-seeing, all-knowing Big Brother still resonates strongly today, when privacy is hard to come by and governments adopt intrusive policies, supposedly to keep their citizens safe.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how being constantly watched and listened to affects how people conduct their lives and what it does to their mental states.

1984 is an inversion of 1948, the year in which Orwell began writing the novel. What historic events were happening in the world at that time, and how might they have influenced the construction of 1984? Is the future Orwell imagines completely made up, or is it based on real-life situations?

Three slogans adorn the entrance to the Ministry of Truth: WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. How is it possible for anyone to believe such paradoxical statements?

Orwell includes "The Principles of Newspeak" as an appendix to the novel proper. Why do you think he wanted to include this information? Why is the control of language so important to the Party in the novel? Can you give examples of how authority figures today manipulate language to their own advantage?

1984 is considered a classic and is often required reading in high school. Why do you think that is?

Book Details

Author : George Orwell
Genre : Literary Fiction
Topics : History
Book type : Fiction
Publisher : Plume
Publication date : June 6, 1949
Number of pages : 368
Last updated : January 15, 2019

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

The Hunger Games, Book 1

Want personalized picks for your kids' age and interests?

Matched, Book 1

Little Brother

UK Edition Change

UK Politics
News Videos
Paris 2024 Olympics
Rugby Union
Sport Videos
John Rentoul
Mary Dejevsky
Andrew Grice
Sean O’Grady
Photography
Theatre & Dance
Culture Videos
Fitness & Wellbeing
Food & Drink
Health & Families
Royal Family
Electric Vehicles
Car Insurance Deals
Lifestyle Videos
Hotel Reviews
News & Advice
Simon Calder
Australia & New Zealand
South America
C. America & Caribbean
Middle East
Politics Explained
News Analysis
Today’s Edition
Home & Garden
Broadband deals
Fashion & Beauty
Travel & Outdoors
Sports & Fitness
Climate 100
Sustainable Living
Climate Videos
Solar Panels
Behind The Headlines
On The Ground
Decomplicated
You Ask The Questions
Binge Watch
Travel Smart
Watch on your TV
Crosswords & Puzzles
Most Commented
Newsletters
Ask Me Anything
Virtual Events
Wine Offers
Betting Sites

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

1984 by George Orwell, book of a lifetime: An absorbing, deeply affecting political thriller

The novel creates a world so plausible, so complete that to read it is to experience another world, says jonathan freedland, article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

John Hurt as Winston Smith in the film version of 1984

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails

So much of it has entered the language, becoming a settled part of our common cultural inheritance, that it's easy to forget that 1984 was ever a book at all. From Big Brother to Doublethink, the landscape of the dystopia George Orwell created in 1949 exists in the minds even of those who've never picked up the novel. It has become a shorthand for totalitarianism, for the surveillance state, for the power of the mass media to manipulate public opinion, history and even the truth – and, in the process, has allowed people to forget that it remains a story to be read.

Even those who manage to look beyond its place in the folk memory, and do it the honour of assessing it as a novel, rarely see it for what it is – which is a political thriller. Not just a political thriller, but an exemplar: the very model of the form. It does what every novel in the genre should do – combining the illumination of an intriguing idea and the telling of a cracking story. When people discuss 1984, they tend to talk about Orwell's achievement of the former – his fully realised portrayal of life under a brutal one-party dictatorship – but when people read the book, as I did as a young teenager, what holds them is the fate of its protagonist, Winston Smith, his lover Julia, and their doomed attempt to taste freedom. The book succeeds because it is no manifesto, but an absorbing, deeply affecting story.

It has its defects, of course. Generations of young readers, and not just them, have surely yearned to skip at least some of the treatise by Emmanuel Goldstein, the Trotsky-esque dissident and public enemy whose forbidden work comes into Winston's hands. But little of that matters. The novel creates a world so plausible, so complete that to read it is to experience another world. And what higher goal can fiction reach for than that? And yet it rests on that simple, two-word question on which most political thrillers are built: what if? Orwell asked himself what Britain would look like if it fell prey to either one of the totalitarian creeds that dominated the mid-20th century. From that basic inquiry, 1984 was born.

Robert Harris's Fatherland sprung from asking, "What if Britain lost the war?" Michael Crichton created Jurassic Park by wondering, "What if we could bring dinosaurs back to life?" My new novel asks, "What if China dominates the world? What will life be like?" It's not only journalists who should be in awe of George Orwell. Anyone embarking on a political thriller should look to 1984 – to see how it's done.

Jonathan Freedland's new novel 'The Third Woman' is published by HarperCollins

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

New to The Independent?

Or if you would prefer:

Hi {{indy.fullName}}

My Independent Premium
Account details
Help centre

Non-Fiction
Author’s Corner
Reader’s Corner
Writing Guide
Book Marketing Services
Write for us

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Secker & Warburg

Genre: Dystopian, Science Fiction, Satire

First Publication: 1949

Language: English

Major Characters: Winston Smith, Big Brother, O’Brien, Emmanuel Goldstein, Tom Parsons, Syme, Julia

Theme: Totalitarianism and Communism, The Individual vs. Collective Identity, Reality Control, Class Struggle,

Setting: London in the year 1984

Narrator: Third-person omniscient

Book Summary: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

1984: A Novel, unleashes a unique plot as per which No One is Safe or Free. No place is safe to run or even hide from a dominating party leader, Big Brother, who is considered equal to God. This is a situation where everything is owned by the State. The world was seeing the ruins of World War II. Leaders such as Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini prevailed during this phase. Big Brother is always watching your actions. He even controls everyone’s feelings of love, to live and to discover. The basic plot of this historic novel revolves around the concept that no person has freedom to live life on his or her own terms. The present day is 1984.

The whole world is gradually changing. The nations which enjoy freedom, have distorted into unpleasant and degraded places, in turn creating a powerful cartel known as Oceania. This is the world where the Big Brother controls everything. There is another character Winston Smith, who is leading a normal layman life under these harsh circumstances, though hating all of this. He works on writing the old newspaper articles in order to make history or past relevant to today’s party line.

He is efficient enough in spite of hating his bosses. Julia, a young girl who is morally very rigid comes into the fore. She too hates the system as much as Winston does. Gradually, they get into an affair but have to conceal their feelings for each other, as it will not be acceptable by Big Brother. In Big Brother’s bad world, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

Book Review: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighr is an astonishingly good book which practically (almost single-handedly) created and defined the ‘dystopian novel’ genre. This is undoubtedly the definitive dystopian novel which stands astride the genre like a colossus – head and shoulders above the rest.

Written in the year 1948 and first published in 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was originally designed as a satire of Stalinism. Like many of his contemporaries, George Orwell was distraught by the Soviet Union’s increasingly totalitarian interpretation of communism. The Soviet Union would collapse in 1991, of course, and communism plays a marginal role at best in today’s world. So how come Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is currently enjoying a resurgence of popularity? How come it feels more and more relevant in a world dominated by capitalism rather than communism?

The fictional world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is under complete control of The Party and its mythical head, Big Brother. Privacy no longer exists: “ Big Brother is watching you ” – always. Data is collected, minds are molded, consent is manufactured. So-called “ telescreens ” monitor every facial expression and record every spoken word, tirelessly looking for “ thoughtcrimes “ while simultaneously broadcasting a never-ending stream of propaganda. No other source of information is available, so the loss of privacy comes with a loss of history and political agency.

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

The Party is even in the process of developing what it calls “ newspeak ,” a stripped-down, ultimately impotent version of the English language that – through the reduction of grammar and vocabulary – renders subversive ideas unthinkable. Until “ newspeak ” takes over, “ doublethink ” ensures that those little inconsistencies between reality and the claims made by Big Brother (claims such as “ ignorance is strength ” or “ freedom is slavery ” or “ 2+2=5 ”) do not feel problematic in the slightest.

And even if they did, fabricated telescreen reports on what is portrayed as a brutal global war keep the masses in a perpetual state of fear that makes rebellion highly unlikely. Conveniently, this pseudo-war can also be used to justify the elimination of civil rights and liberties. And if there is someone somewhere who somehow manages to resist all this propaganda and surveillance (someone who, like our protagonist, manages to think an independent thought), Big Brother takes the old iron fist out of his pocket and enforces conformity through imprisonment and torture.

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

In today’s world, the scope, sophistication and effectiveness of propaganda and surveillance have long surpassed anything George Orwell could have imagined in 1948. It is not the Communist Party that controls those endeavours, of course, but largely commercial enterprise (with a little help from the politicians it buys).

1984 by George Orwell portrays, with what now seems like terrifying accuracy a near future extreme totalitarian society and it is a novel that is as pertinent today as never before. In an age of ‘ fake news ’ ‘ counter-fake news ’ where truth is increasingly in question, a commodity to be perverted according to need, George Orwell’s 1984 reads like an increasingly and frighteningly accurate portrayal of what was then – a possible future and now a possible present.

Orwell’s concepts of thoughtcrime , doublethink , newspeak , sexcrime , the thought police , along with the wholesale and habitual use of propaganda, the deletion and re-writing of the news/history (‘ he who controls the future controls the past’ ) – historical revisionism, is all just so brilliantly conceived and executed and lest we forget, George Orwell wrote 1984 in year 1949. If it had not been so brilliantly executed, 1984 by George Orwell would undoubtedly have become very clichéd, tired and dated over the subsequent decades – which quite clearly it hasn’t.

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

1984 is now so embedded at such a fundamental level in our culture, it is now almost impossible to imagine an absence of 1984 – itself a paradox considering the subject matter and themes of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. The concept now so oft used as common parlance of something being ‘Orwellian’ – surveillance and control.

What George Orwell has created in Nineteen Eighty-Four (once again and along with Animal Farm ) is simply one of the greatest short novels in the English language ever written, let alone one of the most influential – both in literary and cultural terms. The characters of Winston, Julia and O’Brien, Room 101, the surrounding events, the world of Oceania, Ingsoc and the Party remain seared into the readers’ memory with startling effectiveness long after the last page has been turned.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is an outstandingly (in every sense of the word) powerful, thought-provoking, compelling, engaging portrait of an all too feasible near future. Parallels in history are clearly there to see – the National Socialism of Hitler, the Communism of Stalin to name but two – showing us the absolute feasibility of such a world. The way that Orwell writes of the manipulation and creation / management of mass hysteria, the instillation and perpetuation of xenophobia and the unquestioning and blind allegiance to the ‘Party’ has such a feeling of authenticity and is all done so effectively and unbelievably well.

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

I cannot overstate the brilliance of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, nor emphasise the power that this novel increasingly has, though perhaps to say that 1984 by George Orwell is quite simply a work of modern literary genius will go some way in conveying how truly great a novel this really is.

George Orwell’s 1984 paints a horrifying picture of a world that could so easily be – an intelligent portrayal of and warning against the evils of totalitarianism and extreme authoritarianism of any kind. But it is so much more than that, along with providing us with such a great central story – a story not solely about power, corruption and lies, but also about love, truth and the human spirit, Nineteen Eighty-Four works on so many, many levels. George Orwell’s 1984 is absolutely, unquestionably and unequivocally essential reading.

I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue

The restaurant of lost recipes by hisashi kashiwai, the september house by carissa orlando, sociopath – a memoir by patric gagne, the full moon coffee shop by mai mochizuki, more like this related, book marketing and promotion services.

We provide genuine and custom-tailored book marketing services and promotion strategies. Our services include book reviews and social media promotion across all possible platforms, which will help you in showcasing the books, sample chapters, author interviews, posters, banners, and other promotional materials. In addition to book reviews and author interviews, we also provide social media campaigning in the form of contests, events, quizzes, and giveaways, as well as sharing graphics and book covers. Our book marketing services are very efficient, and we provide them at the most competitive price.

The Book Marketing and Promotion Plan that we provide covers a variety of different services. You have the option of either choosing the whole plan or customizing it by selecting and combining one or more of the services that we provide. The following is a list of the services that we provide for the marketing and promotion of books.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews have direct impact on readers while they are choosing their next book to read. When they are purchasing book, most readers prefer the books with good reviews. We’ll review your book and post reviews on Amazon, Flipkart, Goodreads and on our Blogs and social-media channels.

Author Interviews

We’ll interview the author and post those questions and answers on blogs and social medias so that readers get to know about author and his book. This will make author famous along with his book among the reading community.

Social Media Promotion

We have more than 170K followers on our social media channels who are interested in books and reading. We’ll create and publish different posts about book and author on our social media platforms.

Social Media Set up

Social Media is a significant tool to reaching out your readers and make them aware of your work. We’ll help you to setup and manage various social media profiles and fan pages for your book.

We’ll provide you our social media marketing guide, using which you may take advantage of these social media platforms to create and engage your fan base.

Website Creation

One of the most effective and long-term strategies to increase your book sales is to create your own website. Author website is must have tool for authors today and it doesn’t just help you to promote book but also helps you to engage with your potential readers. Our full featured author website, with blog, social media integration and other cool features, is the best marketing tool you can have. You can list each of your titles and link them to buy from various online stores.

Google / Facebook / Youtube Adverts

We can help you in creating ad on Google, Facebook and Youtube to reach your target audience using specific keywords and categories relevant to your book.

With our help you can narrow down your ads to the exact target audience for your book.

For more details mail us at [email protected]

The Bookish Elf is your single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of literary life. The Bookish Elf is a site you can rely on for book reviews, author interviews, book recommendations, and all things books. Contact us: [email protected]

Quick Links

Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined

What 1984 means today

No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984 . The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc— doublethink , memory hole , unperson , thoughtcrime , Newspeak , Thought Police , Room 101 , Big Brother —they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984 . Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. It was too familiar to revisit.

Read: Teaching ‘1984’ in 2016

So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984 . It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And in the Trump era , it’s a best seller .

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 , by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis , but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia —and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”

The biographical story of 1984 —the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura , off Scotland—will be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live—he got remarried on his deathbed—just as the novel’s pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith’s attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. 1984 is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. According to Lynskey, “Nothing in Orwell’s life and work supports a diagnosis of despair.”

Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you .” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.

Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album , imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you. With the arrival of the year 1984, the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level. That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man—oppressive technology—to the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The message: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ”

The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong. Things haven’t turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the president’s adviser Kellyanne Conway justified his false crowd estimate by using the phrase alternative facts , the novel returned to the best-seller lists. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. An authoritarian president who stood the term fake news on its head, who once said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” has given 1984 a whole new life.

What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We don’t live under anything like a totalitarian system. “By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Trump’s election brought a rush of cautionary books with titles like On Tyranny , Fascism: A Warning , and How Fascism Works . My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside 1984 . They pointed back to the 20th century—if it happened in Germany, it could happen here—and warned readers how easily democracies collapse. They were alarm bells against complacency and fatalism—“ the politics of inevitability ,” in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, “a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.” The warnings were justified, but their emphasis on the mechanisms of earlier dictatorships drew attention away from the heart of the malignancy—not the state, but the individual. The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984 , where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: “ ‘The People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.’ — George Orwell.” But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth. The Russians needed partners in this effort and found them by the millions, especially among America’s non-elites. In 1984 , working-class people are called “proles,” and Winston believes they’re the only hope for the future. As Lynskey points out, Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote . In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice —a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they don’t say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.

David Simon and E.L. Doctorow on 'the Potential for the Orwellian Nightmare'

The Hoarding of the American Dream

Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, nowhere more intensely than on Twitter, where the specter of being shamed or “canceled” produces conformity as much as the prospect of adding to your tribe of followers does. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breeds—not out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.

This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. “Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,” Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable. “Sanity is not statistical,” Winston thinks one night as he slips off to sleep. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull.

This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

About the Author

Orwell on the Future

A landscape with rows of people one being dragged away.

George Orwell’s new novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (Harcourt, Brace), confirms its author in the special, honorable place he holds in our intellectual life. Orwell’s native gifts are perhaps not of a transcendent kind; they have their roots in a quality of mind that ought to be as frequent as it is modest. This quality may be described as a sort of moral centrality, a directness of relation to moral—and political—fact, and it is so far from being frequent in our time that Orwell’s possession of it seems nearly unique. Orwell is an intellectual to his fingertips, but he is far removed from both the Continental and the American type of intellectual. The turn of his mind is what used to be thought of as peculiarly “English.” He is indifferent to the allurements of elaborate theory and of extreme sensibility. The medium of his thought is common sense, and his commitment to intellect is fortified by an old-fashioned faith that the truth can be got at, that we can, if we actually want to, see the object as it really is. This faith in the power of mind rests in part on Orwell’s willingness, rare among contemporary intellectuals, to admit his connection with his own cultural past. He no longer identifies himself with the British upper middle class in which he was reared, yet it is interesting to see how often his sense of fact derives from some ideal of that class, how he finds his way through a problem by means of an unabashed certainty of the worth of some old, simple, belittled virtue. Fairness, decency, and responsibility do not make up a shining or comprehensive morality, but in a disordered world they serve Orwell as an invaluable base of intellectual operations.

Radical in his politics and in his artistic tastes, Orwell is wholly free of the cant of radicalism. His criticism of the old order is cogent, but he is chiefly notable for his flexible and modulated examination of the political and aesthetic ideas that oppose those of the old order. Two years of service in the Spanish Loyalist Army convinced him that he must reject the line of the Communist Party and, presumably, gave him a large portion of his knowledge of the nature of human freedom. He did not become—as Leftist opponents of Communism are so often and so comfortably said to become—“embittered” or “cynical;” his passion for freedom simply took account of yet another of freedom’s enemies, and his intellectual verve was the more stimulated by what he had learned of the ambiguous nature of the newly identified foe, which so perplexingly uses the language and theory of light for ends that are not enlightened. His distinctive work as a radical intellectual became the criticism of liberal and radical thought wherever it deteriorated to shibboleth and dogma. No one knows better than he how willing is the intellectual Left to enter the prison of its own mass mind, nor does anyone believe more directly than he in the practical consequences of thought, or understand more clearly the enormous power, for good or bad, that ideology exerts in an unstable world.

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book. It is a fantasy of the political future, and, like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present. Despite the impression it may give at first, it is not an attack on the Labour Government. The shabby London of the Super-State of the future, the bad food, the dull clothing, the fusty housing, the infinite ennui—all these certainly reflect the English life of today, but they are not meant to represent the outcome of the utopian pretensions of Labourism or of any socialism. Indeed, it is exactly one of the cruel essential points of the book that utopianism is no longer a living issue. For Orwell, the day has gone by when we could afford the luxury of making our flesh creep with the spiritual horrors of a successful hedonistic society; grim years have intervened since Aldous Huxley, in “Brave New World,” rigged out the welfare state of Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor in the knickknacks of modern science and amusement, and said what Dostoevski and all the other critics of the utopian ideal had said before—that men might actually gain a life of security, adjustment, and fun, but only at the cost of their spiritual freedom, which is to say, of their humanity. Orwell agrees that the State of the future will establish its power by destroying souls. But he believes that men will be coerced, not cosseted, into soullessness. They will be dehumanized not by sex, massage, and private helicopters but by a marginal life of deprivation, dullness, and fear of pain.

This, in fact, is the very center of Orwell’s vision of the future. In 1984, nationalism as we know it has at last been overcome, and the world is organized into three great political entities. All profess the same philosophy, yet despite their agreement, or because of it, the three Super-States are always at war with each other, two always allied against one, but all seeing to it that the balance of power is kept, by means of sudden, treacherous shifts of alliance. This arrangement is established as if by the understanding of all, for although it is the ultimate aim of each to dominate the world, the immediate aim is the perpetuation of war without victory and without defeat. It has at last been truly understood that war is the health of the State; as an official slogan has it, “War Is Peace.” Perpetual war is the best assurance of perpetual absolute rule. It is also the most efficient method of consuming the production of the factories on which the economy of the State is based. The only alternative method is to distribute the goods among the population. But this has its clear danger. The life of pleasure is inimical to the health of the State. It stimulates the senses and thus encourages the illusion of individuality; it creates personal desires, thus potential personal thought and action.

But the life of pleasure has another, and even more significant, disadvantage in the political future that Orwell projects from his observation of certain developments of political practice in the last two decades. The rulers he envisages are men who, in seizing rule, have grasped the innermost principles of power. All other oligarchs have included some general good in their impulse to rule and have played at being philosopher-kings or priest-kings or scientist-kings, with an announced program of beneficence. The rulers of Orwell’s State know that power in its pure form has for its true end nothing but itself, and they know that the nature of power is defined by the pain it can inflict on others. They know, too, that just as wealth exists only in relation to the poverty of others, so power in its pure aspect exists only in relation to the weakness of others, and that any power of the ruled, even the power to experience happiness, is by that much a diminution of the power of the rulers.

The exposition of the mystique of power is the heart and essence of Orwell’s book. It is implicit throughout the narrative, explicit in excerpts from the remarkable “Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” a subversive work by one Emmanuel Goldstein, formerly the most gifted leader of the Party, now the legendary foe of the State. It is brought to a climax in the last section of the novel, in the terrible scenes in which Winston Smith, the sad hero of the story, having lost his hold on the reality decreed by the State, having come to believe that sexuality is a pleasure, that personal loyalty is a good, and that two plus two always and not merely under certain circumstances equals four, is brought back to health by torture and discourse in a hideous parody on psychotherapy and the Platonic dialogues.

Orwell’s theory of power is developed brilliantly, at considerable length. And the social system that it postulates is described with magnificent circumstantiality: the three orders of the population—Inner Party, Outer Party, and proletarians; the complete surveillance of the citizenry by the Thought Police, the only really efficient arm of the government; the total negation of the personal life; the directed emotions of hatred and patriotism; the deified Leader, omnipresent but invisible, wonderfully named Big Brother; the children who spy on their parents; and the total destruction of culture. Orwell is particularly successful in his exposition of the official mode of thought, Doublethink, which gives one “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” This intellectual safeguard of the State is reinforced by a language, Newspeak, the goal of which is to purge itself of all words in which a free thought might be formulated. The systematic obliteration of the past further protects the citizen from Crimethink, and nothing could be more touching, or more suggestive of what history means to the mind, than the efforts of poor Winston Smith to think about the condition of man without knowledge of what others have thought before him.

By now, it must be clear that “Nineteen Eighty-four” is, in large part, an attack on Soviet Communism. Yet to read it as this and as nothing else would be to misunderstand the book’s aim. The settled and reasoned opposition to Communism that Orwell expresses is not to be minimized, but he is not undertaking to give us the delusive comfort of moral superiority to an antagonist. He does not separate Russia from the general tendency of the world today. He is saying, indeed, something no less comprehensive than this: that Russia, with its idealistic social revolution now developed into a police state, is but the image of the impending future and that the ultimate threat to human freedom may well come from a similar and even more massive development of the social idealism of our democratic culture. To many liberals, this idea will be incomprehensible, or, if it is understood at all, it will be condemned by them as both foolish and dangerous. We have dutifully learned to think that tyranny manifests itself chiefly, even solely, in the defense of private property and that the profit motive is the source of all evil. And certainly Orwell does not deny that property is powerful or that it may be ruthless in self-defense. But he sees that, as the tendency of recent history goes, property is no longer in anything like the strong position it once was, and that will and intellect are playing a greater and greater part in human history. To many, this can look only like a clear gain. We naturally identify ourselves with will and intellect; they are the very stuff of humanity, and we prefer not to think of their exercise in any except an ideal way. But Orwell tells us that the final oligarchical revolution of the future, which, once established, could never be escaped or countered, will be made not by men who have property to defend but by men of will and intellect, by “the new aristocracy . . . of bureaucrats, scientists, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.”

These people [says the authoritative Goldstein, in his account of the revolution], whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal.

The whole effort of the culture of the last hundred years has been directed toward teaching us to understand the economic motive as the irrational road to death, and to seek salvation in the rational and the planned. Orwell marks a turn in thought; he asks us to consider whether the triumph of certain forces of the mind, in their naked pride and excess, may not produce a state of things far worse than any we have ever known. He is not the first to raise the question, but he is the first to raise it on truly liberal or radical grounds, with no intention of abating the demand for a just society, and with an overwhelming intensity and passion. This priority makes his book a momentous one. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

They thought that they’d found the perfect apartment. They weren’t alone .

The world’s oldest temple and the dawn of civilization .

What happened to the whale from “Free Willy.”

It was one of the oldest buildings left downtown. Why not try to save it ?

The religious right’s leading ghostwriter .

After high-school football stars were accused of rape, online vigilantes demanded that justice be served .

A comic strip by Alison Bechdel: the seven-minute semi-sadistic workout .

NONFICTION BOOKS
BEST NONFICTION 2023
BEST NONFICTION 2024
Historical Biographies
The Best Memoirs and Autobiographies
Philosophical Biographies
World War 2
World History
American History
British History
Chinese History
Russian History
Ancient History (up to c. 500 AD)
Medieval History (500-1400)
Military History
Art History
Travel Books
Ancient Philosophy
Contemporary Philosophy
Ethics & Moral Philosophy
Great Philosophers
Social & Political Philosophy
Classical Studies
New Science Books
Maths & Statistics
Popular Science
Physics Books
Climate Change Books
How to Write
English Grammar & Usage
Books for Learning Languages
Linguistics
Political Ideologies
Foreign Policy & International Relations
American Politics
British Politics
Religious History Books
Mental Health
Neuroscience
Child Psychology
Film & Cinema
Opera & Classical Music
Behavioural Economics
Development Economics
Economic History
Financial Crisis
World Economies
Investing Books
Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
Data Science Books
Sex & Sexuality
Death & Dying
Food & Cooking
Sports, Games & Hobbies
FICTION BOOKS
BEST NOVELS 2024
BEST FICTION 2023
New Literary Fiction
World Literature
Literary Criticism
Literary Figures
Classic English Literature
American Literature
Comics & Graphic Novels
Fairy Tales & Mythology
Historical Fiction
Crime Novels
Science Fiction
Short Stories
South Africa
United States
Arctic & Antarctica
Afghanistan
Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
Netherlands
Kids Recommend Books for Kids
High School Teachers Recommendations
Prizewinning Kids' Books
Popular Series Books for Kids
BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS (ALL AGES)
Ages Baby-2
Books for Teens and Young Adults
THE BEST SCIENCE BOOKS FOR KIDS
BEST KIDS' BOOKS OF 2024
BEST BOOKS FOR TEENS OF 2024
Best Audiobooks for Kids
Environment
Best Books for Teens of 2024
Best Kids' Books of 2024
Mystery & Crime
Travel Writing
New History Books
New Historical Fiction
New Biography
New Memoirs
New World Literature
New Economics Books
New Climate Books
New Math Books
New Philosophy Books
New Psychology Books
New Physics Books
THE BEST AUDIOBOOKS
Actors Read Great Books
Books Narrated by Their Authors
Best Audiobook Thrillers
Best History Audiobooks
Nobel Literature Prize
Booker Prize (fiction)
Baillie Gifford Prize (nonfiction)
Financial Times (nonfiction)
Wolfson Prize (history)
Royal Society (science)
Pushkin House Prize (Russia)
Walter Scott Prize (historical fiction)
Arthur C Clarke Prize (sci fi)
The Hugos (sci fi & fantasy)
Audie Awards (audiobooks)

The Best Fiction Books

Nineteen eighty-four, by george orwell.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel written in 1948. Often a standard text in school for teenagers, 1984 is many people’s first introduction to totalitarianism. Ominously prescient in some ways, (such as the scope for surveillance to reach into our lives through the ubiquity of screens) and wide off the mark in others (Big Brother’s omnipresent, unitary police state is not a reality we live with in the West), it makes fascinating reading.

Some of Orwell’s inventions from 1984 entered the English language, like ‘Thought Police,’ ‘Big Brother’ ‘Newspeak’ and of course, the general concept of an ‘Orwellian’ society or future.

Recommendations from our site

“In terms of how technology is working in our modern surveillance powers, it’s a terrifyingly prophetic book in some of its implications for 21st-century human life. Orwell would deny that it was prophecy; he said it was a warning. But in fact, distinguished Orwell scholar Professor Peter Davis once made a list of all the things that Orwell got right, and it was a couple of fairly long paragraphs, and it was really rather terrifying.” Read more...

The Best George Orwell Books

D J Taylor , Biographer

“ Nineteen Eighty-Four is seriously read in China by intellectuals, who see similarities between the world of George Orwell and present-day China.” Read more...

The best books on Dystopia and Utopia

Chan Koonchung , Novelist

“It’s eerily predictive of the sort of video camera surveillance world that we now live in. It would be interesting to update 1984 and make all of the things that Orwell foresaw more annoying than dangerous. Well, some of them do get pretty dangerous, but things like television that looks back at you turns out to be a real pain in the ass more than an instrument of government control. We’ve come into the world of 1984 but it turns out to be 1984-Lite .” Read more...

The Best Political Satire Books

P. J. O’Rourke , Political Commentator

“None of us love Big Brother, but we all know he is part of the family. Big Brother is like the uncle we don’t like who has to be invited for Christmas. The question is: How do we live with Big Brother without him ruining our lives?” Read more...

The best books on The US Intelligence Services

Tim Weiner , Journalist

“It alerts us to the danger of unfettered state power, which under any circumstance always ends up committing violations against individuals.” Read more...

The best books on Torture

Juan Mendez , Lawyer

“Orwellian has come to mean the kind of surveillance state we live in today, with all the CCTV. It’s not a prophetic book but it’s a warning.” Read more...

The best books on Global Security

Chris Abbott , Nonprofit Leaders & Activist

“It was originally titled 1948, but the publisher said to him that was too close. They had to push it back, so he just changed it around to 1984.” Read more...

The best books on Human Imperfection

Henry Normal , Poet

“This is the ultimate dystopia written by someone who wasn’t just one of the greatest of all journalists, but one of the most prescient…Orwell is of perennial fascination to me because…he straddles the world of investigative journalism and fiction. He also deliberately chose to experience different levels of society, which I believe is essential for a novelist interested in the truth about the way we live now. He wrote this book in 1948, when he was dying of tuberculosis, in a great burst of passionate determination, because he could see long before other people where totalitarianism and communism were heading. Animal Farm had told it as a kind of dark fairy-tale, but this was the culmination. The intellectual dishonesty of the Left, which refused to see how evil Stalin was, is despicable, and Orwell was brave enough to stand up to his friends as well as his enemies. Orwell saw the death of the dream at first-hand in Spain. He was in contact with a lot of communists, and fought on their sides against Fascism but, as Stalin’s Russia gained power, he could see this dream of equality that so many idealistic and young people have shared leaves a nightmare, just like Fascism. Anything other than democracy and truth leaves the jackboot stamping eternally into the human face, as Winston realises. His hero Winston is named, of course, after Winston Churchill” Read more...

Books that Changed the World

Amanda Craig , Journalist

“The book looks at how order and disorder co-habit. Orwell, without ever having gone to the USSR, understood it from the outside brilliantly.” Read more...

The best books on Totalitarian Russia

Robert Service , Historian

Other books by George Orwell

Down and out in paris and london by george orwell, burmese days by george orwell, a clergyman’s daughter by george orwell, keep the aspidistra flying by george orwell, the road to wigan pier by george orwell, homage to catalonia by george orwell, our most recommended books, middlemarch by george eliot, jane eyre by charlotte brontë, beloved by toni morrison, war and peace by leo tolstoy, dracula by bram stoker, ulysses by james joyce.

Support Five Books

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce, please support us by donating a small amount .

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , completed in 1948 and published a year later, is a classic example of dystopian fiction. Indeed, it’s surely the most famous dystopian novel in the world, even if its ideas are known by far more people than have actually read it. (According to at least one survey , Nineteen Eighty-Four is the book people most often claim to have read when they haven’t.)

Like many novels that are more known about than are carefully read and analysed, Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually a more complex work than the label ‘nightmare dystopian vision’ can convey. Before we offer an analysis of the novel’s themes and origins, let’s briefly recap the plot.

Nineteen Eighty-Four : plot summary

In the year 1984, Britain has been renamed Airstrip One and is a province of Oceania, a vast totalitarian superstate ruled by ‘the Party’, whose politics are described as Ingsoc (‘English Socialism’). Big Brother is the leader of the Party, which keeps its citizens in a perpetual state of fear and submission through a variety of means.

Surveillance is a key part of the novel’s world, with hidden microphones (which are found in the countryside as well as urban areas, and can identify not only what is said but also who says it) and two-way telescreen monitors being used to root out any dissidents, who disappear from society with all trace of their existence wiped out.

They become, in the language of Newspeak (the language used by people in the novel), ‘unpersons’. People are short of food, perpetually on the brink of starvation, and going about in fear for their lives.

The novel’s setting is London, where Trafalgar Square has been renamed Victory Square and the statue of Horatio Nelson atop Nelson’s Column has been replaced by one of Big Brother. Through such touches, Orwell defamiliarises the London of the 1940s which the original readers would have recognised, showing how the London they know might be transformed under a totalitarian regime.

The novel’s protagonist is Winston Smith, who works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting historical records so they are consistent with the state’s latest version of history. However, even though his day job involves doing the work of the Party, Winston longs to escape the oppressive control of the Party, hoping for a rebellion.

Winston meets the owner of an antique shop named Mr Charrington, from whom he buys a diary in which he can record his true feelings towards the Party. Believing the working-class ‘proles’ are the key to a revolution, Winston visits them, but is disappointed to find them wholly lacking in any political understanding.

Meanwhile, hearing of the existence of an underground resistance movement known as the Brotherhood – which has been formed by the rival of Big Brother, a man named Emmanuel Goldstein – Winston suspects that O’Brien, who also works with him, is involved with this resistance.

At lunch with another colleague, named Syme, Winston learns that the English language is being rewritten as Newspeak so as to control and influence people’s thought, the idea being that if the word for an idea doesn’t exist in the language, people will be unable to think about it.

Winston meets a woman named Julia who works for the Ministry of Truth, maintaining novel-writing machines, but believes she is a Party spy sent to watch him. But then Julia passes a clandestine love message to him and the two begin an affair – which is itself illicit since the Party decrees that sex is for reproduction alone, rather than pleasure.

We gradually learn more about Winston’s past, including his marriage to Katherine, from whom he is now separated. Syme, who had been working on Newspeak, disappears in mysterious circumstances: something Winston had predicted.

O’Brien invites Winston to his flat, declaring himself – as Winston had also predicted – a member of the Brotherhood, the resistance against the Party. He gives Winston a copy of the book written by Goldstein, the leader of the Brotherhood.

When Oceania’s enemy changes during the ritual Hate Week, Winston is tasked with making further historical revisions to old newspapers and documents to reflect this change.

Meanwhile, Winston and Julia secretly read Goldstein’s book, which explains how the Party maintains its totalitarian power. As Winston had suspected, the secret to overthrowing the Party lies in the vast mass of the population known as the ‘proles’ (derived from ‘proletarian’, Marx’s term for the working classes). It argues that the Party can be overthrown if proles rise up against it.

But shortly after this, Winston and Julia are arrested, having been shopped to the authorities by Mr Charrington (whose flat above his shop they had been using for their illicit meetings). It turns out that both he and O’Brien work for the Thought Police, on behalf of the Party.

At the Ministry of Love, O’Brien tells Winston that Goldstein’s book was actually written by him and other Party members, and that the Brotherhood may not even exist. Winston endures torture and starvation in an attempt to grind him down so he will accept Big Brother.

In Room 101, a room in which a prisoner is exposed to their greatest fear, Winston is placed in front of a wire cage containing rats, which he fears above all else. Winston betrays Julia, wishing she could take his place and endure this suffering instead.

His reprogramming complete, Winston is allowed to go free, but he is essentially living under a death sentence: he knows that one day he will be summoned by the authorities and shot for his former treachery.

He meets Julia one day, and learns that she was subjected to torture at the Ministry of Love as well. They have both betrayed each other, and part ways. The novel ends with Winston accepting, after all, that the Party has won and that ‘he loved Big Brother.’

Nineteen Eighty-Four : analysis

Nineteen Eighty-Four is probably the most famous novel about totalitarianism, and about the dangers of allowing a one-party state where democracy, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and even freedom of thought are all outlawed. The novel is often analysed as a warning about the dangers of allowing a creeping totalitarianism into Britain, after the horrors of such regimes in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere had been witnessed.

Because of this quality of the book, it is often called ‘prophetic’ and a ‘nightmare vision of the future’, among other things.

However, books set in the future are rarely simply about the future. They are not mere speculation, but are grounded in the circumstances in which they were written.

Indeed, we might go so far as to say that most dystopian novels, whilst nominally set in an imagined future, are really using their future setting to reflect on what are already firmly established social or political ideas. In the case of Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four , this means the novel reflects the London of the 1940s.

By the time he came to write the novel, Orwell already had a long-standing interest in using his writing to highlight the horrors of totalitarianism around the world, especially following his experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. As Orwell put it in his essay ‘ Why I Write ’, all of his serious work written since 1936 was written ‘ against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’.

In his analysis of Nineteen Eighty-Four in his study of Orwell, George Orwell (Reader’s Guides) , Jeffrey Meyers argues convincingly that, rather than being a nightmare vision of the future, a prophetic or speculative work, Orwell’s novel is actually a ‘realistic synthesis and rearrangement of familiar materials’ – indeed, as much of Orwell’s best work is.

His talent lay not in original imaginative thinking but in clear-headed critical analysis of things as they are: his essays are a prime example of this. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in Meyer’s words, ‘realistic rather than fantastic’.

Indeed, Orwell himself stated that although the novel was ‘in a sense a fantasy’, it is written in the form of the naturalistic novel, with its themes and ideas having been already ‘partly realised in Communism and fascism’. Orwell’s intention, as stated by Orwell himself, was to take the totalitarian ideas that had ‘taken root’ in the minds of intellectuals all over Europe, and draw them out ‘to their logical consequences’.

Like much classic speculative fiction – the novels and stories of J. G. Ballard offer another example – the futuristic vision of the author is more a reflection of contemporary anxieties and concerns. Meyers goes so far as to argue that Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually the political regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia ‘transposed’ into London of the early 1940s, during the Second World War.

Certainly, many of the most famous features of Nineteen Eighty-Four were suggested to Orwell by his time working at the BBC in London in the first half of the 1940s: it is well-known that the Ministry of Truth was based on the bureaucratic BBC with its propaganda department, while the infamous Room 101 was supposedly named after a room of that number in the BBC building, in which Orwell had to endure tedious meetings.

The technology of the novel, too, was familiar by the 1940s, involving little innovation or leaps of imagination from Orwell (‘telescreens’ being a natural extension of the television set: BBC TV had been established in 1936, although the Second World War pushed back its development somewhat).

Orwell learned much about the workings of Stalinism from reading Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (1937), written by one of the leading figures in the Russian Revolution of 1917 who saw Stalinist Russia as the antithesis of what Trotsky, Lenin, and those early revolutionaries had been striving to achieve. (This would also be important for Orwell’s Animal Farm , of course.)

And indeed, many of the details surrounding censorship – the rewriting of history, the suppression of dissident literature, the control of the language people use to express themselves and even to think in – were also derived from Orwell’s reading of life in Soviet Russia. Surveillance was also a key element of the Stalinist regime, as in other Communist countries in Europe.

The moustachioed figure of Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four recalls nobody so much as Josef Stalin himself. Not only the ideas of ‘thought crime’ and ‘thought police’, but even the terms themselves, predate Orwell’s use of them: they were first recorded in a 1934 book about Japan.

One of the key questions Winston asks himself in Nineteen Eighty-Four is what the Party is trying to achieve. O’Brien’s answer is simple: the maintaining of power for its own sake. Many human beings want to control other human beings, and they can persuade a worrying number of people to go along with their plans and even actively support them.

Despite the fact that they are starving and living a miserable life, many of the people in Airstrip One love Big Brother, viewing him not as a tyrannical dictator but as their ‘Saviour’ (as one woman calls him). Again, this detail was taken from accounts of Stalin, who was revered by many Russians even though they were often living a wretched life under his rule.

Another key theme of Orwell’s novel is the relationship between language and thought. In our era of fake news and corrupt media, this has only become even more pronounced: if you lie to a population and confuse them enough, you can control them. O’Brien introduces Winston to the work of the traitor to the Party, Emmanuel Goldstein, only to tell him later that Goldstein may not exist and his book was actually written by the Party.

Is this the lie, or was the book the lie? One of the most famous lines from the novel is Winston’s note to himself in his diary: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.’

But later, O’Brien will force Winston to ‘admit’ that two plus two can make five. Orwell tells us, ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.’

Or as Voltaire once wrote, ‘Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust.’ Forcing somebody to utter blatant falsehoods is a powerful psychological tool for totalitarian regimes because through doing so, they have chipped away at your moral and intellectual integrity.

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Type your email…

5 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”

1984 is a novel which is great in spite of itself and has been lionised for the wrong reasons. The title of the novel is a simple anagram of 1948, the date when the novel was written, and was driven by Orwell’s paranoia about the 1945 Labour government in UK. Orwell, a public school man, had built a reputation for hiself in the nineteen thirties as a socialist writer, and had fought for socialism in the Spanish civil war. The Road To Wigan Pier is an excellent polemic attacking the way the UK government was handling the mass unemployment of the time, reducing workers to a state of near starvation. In Homage To Catalonia, Orwell describes his experiences fighting with a small Marxist militia against Franco’s fascists. It was in Spain that Orwell developed his lifelong hatred of Stalinism, observing that the Communist contingents were more interested in suppressing other left-wing factions than in defeating Franco. The 1945 Labour government ws Britain’s first democratically elected socialist governement. It successfully established the welfare state and the National Health Service in a country almost bankrupted by the war, and despite the fact that Truman in USA was demanding the punctual repayment of wartime loans. Instead of rejoicing, Orwell, by now terminally ill from tuberculosis, saw the necessary continuation of wartime austerity and rationing as a deliberate and unnecessary imposition. Consequently, the book is often used as propaganda against socialism. The virtues of the book are the warnings about the dangers of giving the state too much power, in the form of electronic surveillance, ehanced police powers, intrusive laws, and the insidious use of political propaganda to warp peoples’ thinking. All of this has come to pass in the West as well as the East, but because of the overtly anticommunist spin to Orwell’s novel, most people fail to get its important message..

As with other work here, another good review. I’m also fascinated that Orwell located the government as prime problem, whereas Huxley located the people as prime problem, two sides of the same coin.

Pingback: Top 3 Historical Fiction Books – BookNook
Pingback: 10 of the Best Books and Stories Set in the Future – Interesting Literature
Pingback: What is Breaking Encryption and why are Europe and Australia debating on it? – Vaibhav Kalekar

1984 Book Summary – George Orwell

book cover of 1084 with a single eye watching...

06 Mar 1984 Book Summary – George Orwell

This review aims to dissect and analyze “1984” in its entirety, offering insights into its thematic richness, narrative style, and Orwell’s vision of a world subsumed by tyranny and propaganda.

Suggested Reading Age “1984” is best suited for readers aged 15 and above due to its complex themes and some mature content.

Thesis Statement Orwell’s “1984” is not just a novel but a warning, an intricate exploration of the dangers of political extremism and the loss of personal freedom.

Short Synopsis of 1984

“1984” by George Orwell is a dystopian novel that delves into the horrors of a totalitarian society under constant surveillance. Set in the superstate of Oceania, it follows Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party, working at the Ministry of Truth. The Party, led by the elusive Big Brother, exercises absolute control over all aspects of life, including history, language, and even thought. Winston, feeling suppressed and rebellious, begins a forbidden love affair with Julia, a co-worker, as an act of defiance against the Party’s oppressive regime. However, their rebellion is short-lived as they are caught and subjected to brutal psychological manipulation and reconditioning by the Party. The novel explores themes of totalitarianism, propaganda, and the crushing of individuality, culminating in Winston’s tragic acceptance of the Party’s dominance. “1984” remains a powerful warning about the dangers of unchecked government power and the erosion of fundamental human rights.

1984 Detailed Book Summary

“1984” is set in a dystopian future where the world is divided into three superstates constantly at war: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. The story unfolds in Airstrip One (formerly Great Britain), a province of the totalitarian superstate of Oceania, which is under the control of the Party led by the figurehead Big Brother.

Winston Smith : The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, is a 39-year-old man who works at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to alter historical records, thus aligning the past with the ever-changing party line of the present. Winston lives in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation.

Early Acts of Rebellion : Despite outwardly conforming, Winston harbors deep-seated hatred for the Party. He begins to express his subversive thoughts by starting a diary, an act punishable by death if discovered by the Thought Police. Through his writing, Winston explores his fragmented memories of the past, pondering the Party’s control over reality and truth.

Julia and the Love Affair : Winston becomes involved with Julia, a younger Party member who secretly shares his loathing of the regime. Their love affair is initially an act of rebellion. They meet in secret and dream of a life free from the Party’s control. Their relationship represents a profound act of personal freedom and rebellion against the regime.

O’Brien and the Brotherhood : Winston and Julia are drawn to O’Brien, an Inner Party member whom Winston believes to be secretly a member of a clandestine opposition group known as the Brotherhood, led by the legendary Emmanuel Goldstein. O’Brien inducts them into the Brotherhood, providing a copy of Goldstein’s subversive book which outlines the ideology of freedom and rebellion against the Party.

Capture and Betrayal : The illusion of rebellion is shattered when Winston and Julia are arrested in their sanctuary. It is revealed that their rebellion was a trap orchestrated by the Thought Police, with O’Brien as one of its agents.

Winston’s Imprisonment and Torture : In the Ministry of Love, Winston is separated from Julia and subjected to psychological and physical torture. The aim is to force him to confess his crimes against the Party and to break his spirit completely. Winston resists as much as he can, holding onto his inner sense of truth and loyalty to Julia.

Room 101 : The climax of Winston’s torture occurs in Room 101, where he is confronted with his worst fear – rats. In a moment of utter despair and terror, Winston betrays Julia, begging that she be tortured in his place. This ultimate betrayal represents the complete destruction of Winston’s resistance.

Re-education and Acceptance : Following his experience in Room 101, Winston undergoes a process of “re-education” where he learns to accept the Party’s version of reality and to love Big Brother. He is released back into society, a hollow, obedient citizen.

Final Encounter with Julia : After his release, Winston encounters Julia one more time. Both admit to betraying each other and realize that their feelings for each other have been eradicated. The Party’s victory is complete, with any trace of personal loyalty or love eradicated.

Winston’s Final Submission : The novel ends with Winston completely accepting the Party’s doctrine and viewing his execution as a victory – he has conformed entirely to the Party’s ideals. His final thoughts are of unquestioning love and loyalty to Big Brother, signifying the total and absolute triumph of the Party’s control over the individual mind and spirit.

Orwell’s “1984” is a powerful and chilling portrayal of a totalitarian world where freedom of thought is suppressed under the guise of state security, and the truth is what the Party deems it to be. It remains a poignant and cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked political power and the erosion of individual liberties.

The novel delves into Winston’s life as he begins a forbidden love affair with Julia and gets involved with what appears to be an underground resistance movement. However, this rebellion is short-lived as they are betrayed and subjected to the Party’s ruthless tactics of psychological manipulation and physical torture, leading to Winston’s ultimate surrender to the Party’s orthodoxy.

Character Descriptions:

Winston Smith: Age: Approximately 39 years old. Occupation: Works at the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to align with the Party’s current propaganda. Personality Traits: Initially, Winston exhibits intellectual curiosity, internal rebellion, and skepticism towards the Party’s doctrine. He is contemplative, introspective, and carries a sense of melancholy. Character Arc: Winston evolves from a quiet dissident to an active rebel, seeking truth and love in a society devoid of both. His relationship with Julia deepens his rebellious spirit. However, after his capture and torture, he becomes a defeated, loyal follower of Big Brother, losing his individuality and spirit of dissent.
Julia: Age: In her mid-20s. Occupation: Works on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Personality Traits: Julia is practical, sensual, and outwardly conforms to Party norms while secretly despising its control. She is bold and pragmatic in her approach to rebellion, focusing more on personal freedom than on broader political change. Character Arc: Julia engages in an affair with Winston as a form of personal rebellion. She is less interested in the theoretical aspects of their rebellion and more in the personal joy it brings. After their capture, like Winston, she is broken by the Party, ultimately betraying Winston and accepting Party doctrine.
O’Brien: Occupation: A member of the Inner Party. Personality Traits: O’Brien is intelligent, articulate, and initially seems sympathetic to Winston’s skepticism of the Party. He exudes a certain charm and civility. Character Arc: O’Brien reveals himself as a loyalist to the Party and plays a key role in Winston’s torture and re-education. He embodies the Party’s manipulative and brutal nature. His interactions with Winston highlight the Party’s deep understanding of human psychology and its use in breaking down resistance.
Big Brother: Role: The symbolic leader and face of the Party. Description: Big Brother is more a symbol than a character, representing the omnipresent, all-seeing Party. He is depicted as a mustachioed man appearing on posters and telescreens with the slogan “Big Brother is watching you.” His actual existence is ambiguous, but his presence is a powerful tool in the Party’s arsenal for instilling loyalty and fear.
Mr. Charrington: Occupation: Owner of an antique shop in the Proles district. Personality Traits: Initially appears as a kindly, old shopkeeper interested in history and artifacts from the past. Character Arc: Revealed to be a member of the Thought Police, his character highlights the Party’s extensive surveillance network and the deception employed to trap dissidents like Winston and Julia.

In-depth Analysis

Strengths : “1984” excels in its haunting portrayal of a society stripped of freedom and individuality. Orwell masterfully uses a bleak and concise prose style to convey the oppressive atmosphere of Oceania. The intricate depiction of the Party’s manipulation of truth and history remains particularly chilling and relevant.
Weaknesses : For some, the despairing tone and the inevitability of Winston’s defeat may come across as overly pessimistic, offering little in the way of hope or resistance against such a powerful system.
Uniqueness : The novel’s concept of “Newspeak,” the language designed to limit free thought, and “doublethink,” the ability to accept two contradictory beliefs, are unique contributions to the lexicon of political and philosophical thought.
Literary Devices : Orwell’s use of symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony are noteworthy. For instance, the figure of Big Brother symbolizes the impersonal and omnipresent power of the Party.
Relation to Broader Issues : The book’s exploration of surveillance, truth manipulation, and state control has clear parallels with modern concerns about privacy, fake news, and authoritarianism, making it perennially relevant.
Potential Audiences : “1984” is a must-read for enthusiasts of political and dystopian fiction. It is also highly valuable for those interested in political theory, sociology, and history.
Comparisons : “1984” often draws comparisons with Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” another dystopian masterpiece, though Huxley’s work envisages a different form of control through hedonism and consumerism.
Final Recommendations : This novel is an essential read for understanding the extremes of political control and the fragility of human rights. It’s a cautionary tale that remains profoundly relevant in today’s world.

Thematic Analysis and Stylistic Elements

The themes of “1984” are deeply interwoven and reflect Orwell’s concerns about totalitarianism. Themes include the corruption of language as a tool for oppressive power (“Newspeak”), the erosion of truth and reality in politics, and the loss of individuality. Stylistically, Orwell’s direct and terse prose serves as a mirror to the stark world he describes, emphasizing the theme of decay and dehumanization.

Comparisons to Other Works

Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” a satirical allegory of Soviet totalitarianism, shares similar themes with “1984,” but differs in its approach and style, using a fable-like structure. “1984” is more direct and visceral in its depiction of a dystopian society.

Chapter by Chapter Summary of 1984

Chapter 1 : Winston Smith, a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in Oceania, returns to his flat in Victory Mansions. He begins to write a diary, an act prohibited by the Party.
Chapter 2 : Winston recalls recent Two Minutes Hate sessions and reflects on the Party’s control over Oceania’s history and residents. He hides his diary.
Chapter 3 : Winston dreams of his mother and sister, and then of O’Brien, an Inner Party member he believes may secretly oppose the Party. The chapter ends with Winston’s alarm waking him for the Physical Jerks, a mandatory morning exercise.
Chapter 4 : Winston goes to his job at the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to fit the Party’s current version of events.
Chapter 5 : During lunch, Winston discusses the principles of Newspeak with a co-worker, Syme. He observes the Parsons family and considers the effectiveness of Party propaganda on children.
Chapter 6 : Winston thinks about his wife, Katharine, and their cold, lifeless marriage, reflecting on the Party’s repressive attitude towards sex and love.
Chapter 7 : Winston writes in his diary about the hopelessness of rebellion and the likelihood that he will be caught by the Thought Police. He ponders whether life was better before the Party took over.
Chapter 8 : Winston visits a prole neighborhood. He enters an antique shop and buys a coral paperweight. He talks with the shop owner, Mr. Charrington, and learns about life before the Party’s rule.
Chapter 9 : Oceania switches enemies from Eurasia to Eastasia. Winston receives Goldstein’s book and begins reading it.
Chapter 10 : Winston wakes up from a dream shouting, “Shakespeare!” He and Julia plan to rent the room above Mr. Charrington’s shop for their clandestine meetings.
Chapter 11 : In the rented room, Winston and Julia continue their secret meetings, but Winston feels the futility of their rebellion.
Chapter 12 : Winston reads to Julia from Goldstein’s book, explaining the social structure of Oceania and the perpetual war.
Chapter 13 : Winston continues reading the book, discussing the principles of war and the Party’s manipulation of the populace.
Chapter 14 : Winston and Julia are discovered by the Thought Police in their rented room. Mr. Charrington reveals himself as a member of the Thought Police.
Chapter 15 : Winston is detained in the Ministry of Love. He encounters other prisoners and realizes the Party’s extensive power.
Chapter 16 : O’Brien tortures Winston, gradually breaking his spirit. He admits to various crimes against the Party, both real and imagined.
Chapter 17 : O’Brien continues Winston’s re-education, revealing more about the Party’s ideology and the concept of doublethink.
Chapter 18 : Winston is taken to Room 101, where he is confronted with his worst fear—rats. He betrays Julia, proving his complete submission to the Party.
Chapter 19 : Winston is released and spends his time at the Chestnut Tree Café. He is a changed man, devoid of rebellious thoughts.
Chapter 20 : Winston meets Julia again, but their feelings for each other have vanished. They both admit to betraying each other.
Chapter 21 : The novel concludes with Winston, completely broken, confessing his love for Big Brother, accepting Party orthodoxy fully.

Potential Test Questions and Answers

Answer: It signifies the omnipresent surveillance of the Party and the constant monitoring of individuals’ actions and thoughts, instilling fear and obedience.
Answer: “Newspeak” is designed to diminish the range of thought by reducing the complexity and nuance of language, making rebellion against the Party’s ideology linguistically impossible.
Answer: The Thought Police serve to detect and punish “thoughtcrime,” any personal and political thoughts unapproved by the Party, thereby enforcing ideological purity and suppressing dissent.
“George Orwell: The Prophet of the Dystopian Future,” The Literary Encyclopedia.
“Totalitarianism and Language: Orwell’s 1984,” Journal of Modern Literature.

Awards and Recognition

“1984” has received critical acclaim since its publication and has been listed in various “best novels” lists, including the “100 Best Novels of the 20th Century” by the Modern Library.

Bibliographic Information

Publisher: Signet Book
Publish Date: July 01, 1950
Type: Mass Market Paperbound
ISBN/EAN/UPC: 9780451524935

Summaries of Other Reviews

The Guardian: Highlights the novel’s prophetic nature and its enduring relevance in the digital age.
The New Yorker: Discusses the novel’s profound impact on language and political thought.

Notable Quotes from 1984

This paradoxical slogan of the Party encapsulates the use of doublethink, a process of indoctrination that requires citizens to accept contradictory beliefs, fostering a disconnection from reality and thus ensuring loyalty to the Party.
This omnipresent warning is emblematic of the government’s pervasive surveillance in Oceania. It instills fear and obedience in the populace, reminding them of the Party’s constant monitoring of their actions and thoughts.
This reflects the Party’s manipulation of truth and its control over what is considered knowledge. It reveals the theme of reality control and the dangers of a society where objective truth is subjugated to political agenda.
This quote grimly summarizes the Party’s vision for the future: a world where the individual is utterly powerless, and the state exerts total control, both physically and psychologically.
This highlights the Party’s manipulation of history to maintain its grip on power. It underscores a central theme in “1984” — the control of information and history as a means of controlling the populace.
This defines the concept of doublethink, a crucial method by which the Party breaks down individual understanding of truth and reality, ensuring unconditional loyalty.
This statement underscores the significance of objective truth and the resistance against the Party’s distortion of reality. It signifies the importance of individual thought and rationality as a form of rebellion.
This conundrum highlights the challenge faced by those living under totalitarian rule, where the lack of consciousness about their oppression prevents rebellion, yet without rebelling, they cannot become fully aware of their subjugation.

Spoilers/How Does It End?

Warning: This section contains major spoilers about the ending of “1984” by George Orwell.

“1984” culminates in a harrowing and profoundly impactful conclusion that starkly illuminates the depths of the Party’s control over the individual.

Winston’s Transformation and Betrayal : After Winston Smith and Julia are captured by the Thought Police, they are separated and taken to the Ministry of Love for interrogation and re-education. The person responsible for Winston’s capture and subsequent torture is O’Brien, whom Winston had previously believed to be a fellow dissident. This betrayal is a crucial turning point in the novel, as it shatters Winston’s last hope for an organized rebellion against the Party.
The Room 101 Experience : Winston endures severe physical and psychological torture under O’Brien’s supervision. The climax of his torture occurs in Room 101, where prisoners are confronted with their worst fears. For Winston, this is a face cage filled with ravenous rats. Faced with this terror, Winston betrays Julia by begging for her to be tortured in his place. This moment is pivotal as it represents the complete breakdown of Winston’s resistance and the success of the Party in breaking his spirit.
Winston’s Reintegration into Society : After his release, Winston is a shell of his former self. He has been thoroughly brainwashed and now genuinely loves Big Brother. He spends his time at the Chestnut Tree Café, where other broken rebels gather. One day, he meets Julia again. They acknowledge that they betrayed each other and that their feelings for each other have been eradicated. This meeting underscores the Party’s complete victory in destroying individual loyalty and emotion, replacing them with loyalty to the Party alone.
The Final Act of Submission : The novel ends with Winston’s final submission to the Party’s ideology. He has a vision of being executed but realizes that he has won the victory over himself – he loves Big Brother. This chilling conclusion signifies the total and irrevocable triumph of the Party over the individual. Winston’s love for Big Brother is a symbol of the Party’s successful eradication of independent thought and the total reprogramming of the human psyche.

Orwell’s ending is stark and dystopian, offering no hope of rebellion or change. It serves as a powerful warning about the dangers of totalitarianism and the fragility of human rights and freedom under such regimes. The ending is deliberately unsettling, leaving the reader to contemplate the consequences of unchecked political power and the importance of safeguarding democratic values and individual liberties.

Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

Book Review

George Orwell
Fantasy , Science Fiction

Readability Age Range

Secker & Warburg were the original publishers, but now it's published by many publishers, such as Signet Classic, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group
Prometheus Hall of Fame Award Winner, 1984

Year Published

1984 also known as Nineteen-Eighty-Four written by George Orwell has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine .

Plot Summary

Winston Smith works as a clerk in London, the chief city of Airstrip One in the provinces of Oceania. The dystopian nation where Winston lives is ruled by the Party, a totalitarian regime whose key phrases include “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength.” The face of Big Brother, the Party’s figurehead, graces posters on every wall and street corner; the signage warns: “Big Brother is Watching.” Inside every home and workplace, telescreens monitor individuals to ensure their behaviors, facial expressions and even dreams show no indication of dissension. Children are urged to spy on their parents and turn them in for any action that might indicate Party disloyalty. The Party has created its own language, newspeak, that is constantly evolving to eliminate words that don’t promote their orthodoxy. They also preach “doublethink,” where people must believe two opposing thoughts at once if the Party requires it.

Ultimately, the Party seeks to control reality, believing whoever controls the past controls the future, and whoever controls the present controls the past. Government offices, like the one in which Winston works, ensure that any unsavory information about the past is wiped out and rewritten in all publications. The old information is then destroyed as though it never existed. One moment, Party members believe they are at war with the nation of Eurasia. A moment later, they’re told they’ve always been at war with Eastasia, and they are compelled to believe it. Individuals caught rebelling against the Party vanish and are written out of history, becoming “unpersons.”

Winston, unconvinced that the Party is right, begins to rebel in subtle ways. He starts an affair with a co-worker named Julia. He also seeks out a man in his office named O’Brien, whom he believes to be working for the rogue anti-Party group, the Brotherhood. O’Brien gives Winston a book that explains the Party’s tactics. The book talks about the importance of three people classes (in Oceania’s case, the Inner Party, the Outer Party and commoners called proles) and the power struggles between nations that are necessary for keeping these classes intact.

Shortly after Winston has read the book, he and Julia are arrested at their love nest. O’Brien, an operative for the Party, turns them in. He is also Winston’s chief persecutor over the time he spends in prison. Winston is starved, beaten and physically tortured. Worse than that, however, is the mental anguish inflicted to convince him Big Brother and the Party are right. O’Brien explains that the martyrs of old died clutching their beliefs, but that the Party would not allow anyone to die unconverted. In session after session, O’Brien tries to convince Winston that reality exists only in his own mind. If Winston tries hard enough, he can make himself believe what the Party preaches. Winston is finally sent to room 101, where each prisoner meets his deepest fear. Winston’s is rats. When faced with the prospect of being eaten alive by them, he betrays Julia and begs O’Brien to torture her instead of him. Eventually, Winston is completely brainwashed into loving Big Brother and sent back into the world where the Party finds him completely harmless. He encounters Julia once more. They confess their betrayals and no longer have any interest in one another.

Christian Beliefs

The narrator says the proles would be allowed to practice religion if they’d shown any signs of wanting or needing it. A man is imprisoned partly because he allowed the word “God” to remain at the end of a Kipling poem he was revising for the Party. O’Brien’s book likens the Party to the Catholic Church in that one does not achieve membership by inheritance but by opting in.

Other Belief Systems

A woman in Winston’s office cries out that Big Brother is her Savior. Winston tells O’Brien that the world was uninhabited for millions of years. O’Brien objects, saying it is only as old as we are. O’Brien says people could control the laws of nature, such as gravity, if they tried hard enough. He believes power can only be truly asserted when it is done through pain and humiliation. He says God is power, and Party leaders control life, so they are the priests of power. Only in a group setting is power found, he believes, and individuals are infinitely malleable. Winston says he doesn’t believe in God but believes there is something deeper in man, perhaps man’s spirit, that will defeat evil.

Authority Roles

The Inner Party consists of the elite Party members, those who rule and are allowed life’s luxuries. They go to great lengths, including maintaining a constant state of war, to ensure they remain in power. Big Brother is the Party’s figurehead, always watching the actions of Party members. O’Brien will not tell Winston whether Big Brother is a real person, only that he will never die. O’Brien tricks Winston into thinking he (O’Brien) is a dissenter, then betrays Winston. O’Brien shows occasional tenderness in the midst of torturing Winston. He exudes a sense of wisdom and confidence in his beliefs about the Party that intimidates Winston.

Profanity & Violence

The word d–n appears half a dozen times. A woman in prison calls someone the f-word along with b–tard . The Party urges its members to develop passionate, violent tendencies. It televises bloody events, such as a little boy’s arm being blown off. It holds daily and annual Hate festivities to stir the masses into frenzies where they desire to kill or injure others. In one such Hate moment, Winston fantasizes about tying Julia naked to a stake and shooting her full of arrows before raping her and cutting her throat. Adults and children alike revel in the violence of the Party’s monthly public hangings. After a bombing, Winston sees a severed hand and kicks it into the gutter. He tells Julia he’s sorry he didn’t shove his wife off a cliff when he had the opportunity. Winston and Julia tell O’Brien they will do whatever is necessary for the Brotherhood, including distributing addictive drugs, giving others sexually transmitted diseases, throwing sulfuric acid in a child’s face or otherwise killing people. Prisoners, including Winston, are beaten and bloodied until their teeth come out (or are yanked out). Winston is starved and beaten on numerous occasions with fists, boots and steel rods. He often rolls around in his own blood and vomit. As O’Brien prepares to torture Winston with rats, he says the creatures sometimes attack the head and the eyes first and other times burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue. In terror, Winston begs O’Brien to let the rats tear off Julia’s face or strip her flesh to the bones rather than doing it to him .

Sexual Content

The Party does not permit its members to marry for love or have sex for pleasure. They look upon sex as a “disgusting minor operation” and train people this way from childhood. Young Party members are urged to join the Anti-Sex league. Party leaders are working on a scientific way to abolish the orgasm altogether; they want that level of excitement and energy reserved for pro-Party sentiment. They fear losing control if men and women are permitted to form passionate relationships. Winston talks about his wife’s rigidity and sexual “submission” to him so they could produce a child. He details a sexual encounter with an old prostitute.

The proles have no restrictions on sex and are even granted divorces. The Party produces pornographic, astrological and sensational literature and films for the proles in the Pornosec department. Julia worked there for a while, an indication that the Party felt she had good character.

Winston dreams of Julia flinging off her clothes. Later, they begin a secret love affair. She confesses she’s had many and tells him she wants nothing to do with purity, virtue or goodness, but wants to be corrupt. For both, the affair is as much about rebellion against the Party as it is about sex and relationship. He comments on her breasts and about nakedness in general, and they have sex a number of times.

After his capture, Winston wonders if he’ll be sent to a prison camp. He’s heard they allow homosexuality, prostitution and illicit alcohol use. He confesses (dishonestly) to sexual perversion when he is being tortured.

Discussion Topics

Get free discussion questions for this book and others, at FocusOnTheFamily.com/discuss-books .

Additional Comments

Alcohol: Party members drink a sickly, oily spirit called Victory gin, which burns like nitric acid going down but eventually makes the world look more cheerful. When Julia and Winston visit O’Brien at his home, he gives them wine, a drink reserved for Inner Party members.

Smoking: Winston and other Party members smoke poorly made Victory cigarettes. One of Winston’s co-workers smokes a pipe.

You can request a review of a title you can’t find at [email protected] .

Book reviews cover the content, themes and worldviews of fiction books, not their literary merit, and equip parents to decide whether a book is appropriate for their children. The inclusion of a book’s review does not constitute an endorsement by Focus on the Family.

Latest Book Reviews

The Mystery of Locked Rooms

The Book of Bill

Lonely Castle in the Mirror

Grief in the Fourth Dimension

The First State of Being

Weekly reviews straight to your inbox.

By George Orwell

'1984' by George Orwell follows Winston Smith as he seeks to fight back, through knowledge and free thought, against the totalitarian Party that rules Oceania and his entire life.

About the Book

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

The novel takes place in the year 1984 in which England has been transformed under a totalitarian superstate known as Oceania. 1984 follows Winston Smith , a mid-level member of the Party. The Party demands the allegiance and adoration of its citizens. But, Winston Smith has escaped the brainwashing that seems to have taken over everyone else’s mind. At the center of the Party is a mysterious figurehead who goes by the name of Big Brother . Winston’s burgeoning interest in the past and his hatred of the Party and its cruel, murderous, and destructive policies lead him to seek out the revolution.

Key Facts about 1984

Title: Nineteen-Eighty-Four: A Novel, later republished as 1984.
When/where written : Orwell wrote the book in Jura, Scotland from 1945-1949 .
Published: June 1949
Literary Period: Late Modernism
Genre: Novel / Dystopian / Science Fiction
Point-of-View: Third-person omniscient
Setting: London/Oceania in 1984
Climax: Torture scene in Room 101 .
Antagonist: The Party/ O’Brien /Big Brother

George Orwell and 1984

It is for 1984 that George Orwell is best-known. The events of his life led him down a path that allowed him to see the world through a very clear lens. His belief system was well fostered and served to inspire him to write 1984 and Animal Farm , as well as other works of fiction and non-fiction that seek to promote democratic socialism over any form of totalitarianism. As a young man, Orwell lived in poverty in London and Paris in order to learn about the darkest parts of society. Unlike most men and women with strongly held beliefs, he stood up for them. When he traveled to Spain to write about the Spanish Civil War he ended up joining a militia in order to fight against fascism and Franco. He was shot in the neck and charged with treason for his efforts. Orwell was well aware of the dangers of totalitarianism and Soviet Communism and knew that the conditions he depicted in both novels could occur anywhere at any time. Today, the books are considered to be a reminder that democracy is not bulletproof. It is possible for our better-governing systems and better selves, to fail.

Books Related to 1984

When George Orwell wrote 1984 dystopian fiction was not the genre that it is today. At the time that he was writing 1984, there were several wonderful examples of this genre from which he could draw inspiration. Some of these include his mentor Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World published in 1932, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We published in 1924, and Jack London’s The Iron Heel . The latter is considered to be the earliest example of the genre, published in 1908.

Over the decades the genre would grow, becoming one of the most popular amongst readers and writers. Today, there are numerous contemporary examples of novels and short stories that have their origins in George Orwell’s masterpiece. These include books like The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Stand by Stephen King, The Power by Naomi Alderman, The Giver by Lois Lowry, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

The Lasting Impact of 1984

Today, as anti-democratic, pro-isolationist, and even fascist governments are taking power all over the world, many have turned to Orwell for his knowledge of these systems and the importance of fighting back against them. Totalitarianism is not a thing of the past and luckily we have 1984 as well as Orwell’s other novels and essays to remind us how possible it is to lose our democratic systems of governance.

1984 Quotes 💬

1984 historical context 📺, 1984 themes and analysis 📺, 1984 review ⭐, 1984 character list 📖, 1984 summary 📖, about emma baldwin.

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

Discover the secrets to learning and enjoying literature.

Join Book Analysis

Supported by

The Making of ‘1984,’ George Orwell’s Nightmare Vision of a World Without Truth

Share full article

Apple Books
Barnes and Noble
Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

By Lev Mendes

June 5, 2019

THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH The Biography of George Orwell’s “1984” By Dorian Lynskey

Shortly after the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump and his counselor’s invocation of “alternative facts ,” anxious readers, bracing themselves for the worst, propelled George Orwell’s “1984” back to the top of the best-seller lists . Published in 1949, under the shadow of Hitler and Stalin, the novel projects a nightmare vision of a future in which truth has been eclipsed. Its inventive vocabulary of state power and deception — Big Brother, Hate Week, Newspeak, doublethink, the Thought Police — clearly resonated with the despair of present-day Americans. As does the very term “Orwellian,” used increasingly to describe any number of troubling developments: from Trump’s habitual lying to the toxic politicization of the news media; from the expansion of campus speech codes to Silicon Valley’s hijacking of our data and attention (the citizens of “1984” are monitored continuously by “telescreens”).

Orwell’s novel is the subject of Dorian Lynskey’s wide-ranging and sharply written new study, “The Ministry of Truth.” Lynskey, a British journalist and music critic, believes that “1984” — one of the 20th century’s most examined artifacts — is actually “more known about than truly known” and sets out to reground it in Orwell’s personal and literary development. This is just as well, since Orwell, ever suspicious of armchair intellectualism, made a practice of writing directly from experience, to the point of plunging himself into many of the crises of his day.

In 1936, he joined a coalition of left-wing forces opposing Franco in Spain. Intending to fight fascism, Orwell discovered its diabolical twin, Soviet communism, and became, in Lynskey’s words, acutely aware of how “political expediency corrupts moral integrity, language and truth itself.” He left Spain a committed anti-communist — and lifelong adversary of Stalin’s defenders — and spent the World War II years back home in England. In 1946, Orwell moved to the island of Jura, where, at the age of 45, he completed “1984” shortly before succumbing to tuberculosis.

Lynskey focuses much of his book on the origins and the afterlife of “1984.” He devotes several early chapters to the rise of utopian and dystopian fiction, told through compressed portraits of figures like H. G. Wells (who “loomed over Orwell’s childhood like a planet”) and Yevgeny Zamyatin, the author of “We” — a sort of precursor to “1984.” And he documents the various political and cultural responses to the novel, which was a sensation from its first publication.

“1984” has inspired writers, artists and other creative types, from Margaret Atwood to David Bowie to Steve Jobs, whose commercial introducing Apple’s Macintosh computer famously paid homage to the novel. Its political fate, however, has been somewhat cloudier. What Orwell observed of Dickens, that he is “one of those writers who are well worth stealing,” has proved no less true of Orwell himself. Socialists, libertarians, liberals and conservatives alike have vied to remake him in their own image and claim his authority. Orwell’s contested legacy may be rooted partly in his self-divisions. He was a socialist intellectual who hated socialists and intellectuals; an alienated soul who “lionized the common man,” as Lynskey puts it. Still, the filial (and often proprietary) attachment that Orwell’s work tends to evoke in his admirers points to something else: the morally urgent yet highly companionable nature of his writing, which can leave one with the feeling of having been directly addressed by a mind worthy of emulation.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

Want all of The Times? Subscribe .

Chick-Lit Books
Drama Books
Fantasy Books
Hindi Novels
Historical Fiction Books
Horror Books
Humour Books
Mythological Fiction Books
Romance Novels
Sci-Fi Books
Short Story Books
Thriller & Mystery Books
Biography & Memoir
Business and Economics
History Books
Religion & Mythology
Self-help Books
Travel and Places
Conversations

1984 | George Orwell | Book Review

After a long time, I got my hands on something that wasn’t about the affairs of the world or decoding Tharoor’s onerous and demanding vocabulary while finding my way out to the conclusion of the book.

But little did I know that those 300 pages made more sense than any philosopher or great thinker ever did with his narratives about the world and its astounding power politics. And to make it as dramatic as fictions are, it sure wasn’t ‘your average fiction’.

George Orwell’s 1984 has been a timeless classic , yet there is something contemporary about it. Fascinated by its constant appeal for so many generations, I decided to take part in the conspiracy myself. Completing 100 pages a day of an ebook didn’t feel like an achievement till I did not reach the appendix of the work.

The impact of the book was so that the thought of it didn’t leave my head for hours and hours throughout the day. It felt as if it was written in this time and age and was so close to the living reality that it felt worth not escaping.

The paradox in Winston Smith’s life was one thing that would leave you gazing at the screen for days straight. While his sheer capability of comprehending the concept of real freedom was noteworthy, it was remarkable to witness the dilemma his mind was going through while trying to differentiate between reality and illusion that was constantly present because of the intense stare by Big Brother’s eyes and the invisible curve under his moustache which was inevitable to ignore.

The features were so definite that the presence of Big Brother felt almost real. His impressions were literally present in every form and everywhere, be it physically (or mentally).

Every object, living or dead, witnessed Big Brother everywhere, in the form of the posters and advertisements and telescreen and songs and Hate Hours organized by the party and the development of kids into Spies in their blue uniforms and so on. It was a never-ending trail of praises for Big Brother and his ideology of state control.

It’s left unsaid if Big Brother existed in reality or not, but every single movement and every single breath of the people were guided by his words “Big Brother Is Watching You”.

Winston Smith’s efforts to face his dilemmas and accept the reality around him made him understand his disliking for the state and its despotic ministries.

DESPITE TRYING HARD ENOUGH TO STAND AGAINST THE REGIME, BUT WITH ALL CAUTION TO AVOID THE ARREST UNDER ‘THOUGHTCRIME’, WINSTON FAILS TO MOVE THINGS ACCORDING TO HIS PLANS.

The book takes you through a rollercoaster ride of sentiments, that a human brain can perceive and reflect, without breaking the flow of the story. From a supposedly brave love story which you root for, to the failure of Winston’s decision-making instincts, you feel vexed, dismay, betrayal, heartbroken, all at once.

In 1984, the narration is so overwhelming that you are left to absorb all those nail-biting endings that you were not prepared for. And all of this coming out of just a three hundred-page fiction leaves you amused.

It’s difficult to let go of the fact that a mere fiction, written in the 1940s has enough strength to make you realize that the existence of power play and human exploitation in the non-fictional world is in no way different from what Smith lives every day.

It is not just an anxious story about the state and the use of its unfair means to do as it pleases, but also about human relations with one another. A story where parents can’t trust their own children, a colleague can’t sit with another colleague, an individual unable to even think the thoughts of his liking, a story about extensive inequality, and a story of an utter betrayal by your own instincts that get you in the hands of your enemy, served as a fresh fish.

It’s a bird’s eye view of the world that lives amidst conformity and surveillance of the people, by people.

The conclusion makes you realize that Orwell was a child of his time who knew more than any other nearing generation of fully evolved human intellectuals. Or maybe he just wanted to be honest to the growing generation who was about to read his excellent work that portrayed a clear picture of human psychology and the greed for power behind the smokescreen of 1984.

It’s an uncompromising reminder for us to have a look at the present and ever-evolving global stage to understand what Smith meant when he said, “Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two is four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

It makes you wonder if the definitions fed to us about the ideals of constitutions from all around the world stand true on the face of it, or it was just another big work of few philosophers. This review is just a medium of appeal to anyone who hasn’t picked up 1984 yet, but it is on their wishlist, to give it a shot without thinking twice.

Can’t wait to read it? Buy your copy of 1984 using the link below.

Review by Jayashree Mishra .

Jayashree is 20 years old, and a student of Delhi University Political Science (Hons). She has been reading since grade 6th and like any typical teenager, her first ‘favorite’ author was Chetan Bhagat, and his book 3 Mistakes Of My Life was her first read. She considers admiring Bhagat as the first mistake in her life. She is currently more inclined towards the world of nonfiction and but Khalid Hosseini still remains her favorite.

Categorized in:

George Orwell | 4.34 | 4,264,855 ratings and reviews

Ranked #1 in 20th Century , Ranked #1 in Hope — see more rankings .

Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of 1984 from the world's leading experts.

Richard Branson Founder/Virgin Group Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. (Source)

Steve Jobs Founder/Apple called this book "one of his favorite" and recommended it to the hires. The book also inspired one the greatest TV ad (made by Jobs) (Source)

Emma Watson Recommends this book

Matt Mullenweg Founder & CEO/Automattic Recommends this book

Chan Koonchung Nineteen Eighty-Four is seriously read in China by intellectuals, who see similarities between the world of George Orwell and present-day China. (Source)

Robert Service The book looks at how order and disorder co-habit. Orwell, without ever having gone to the USSR, understood it from the outside brilliantly. (Source)

Chris Abbott Orwellian has come to mean the kind of surveillance state we live in today, with all the CCTV. It’s not a prophetic book but it’s a warning. (Source)

Tristan Harris Recommends this book

Roxana Bitoleanu [One of the books that had the biggest impact on ] 1984, the future we are living today envisioned way back. (Source)

Ella Botting This book marked a fundamental shift in my mental model and the way I process and consider things. This book taught to never take things at face value and to always challenge information that is presented to me, both of these skills make me a better researcher. It taught me to be empathetic and was a stark reminder that things aren’t always what they seem, on a personal and on a macro level. Considering it’s eerie similarities to the society we now live in, it also taught me to be cautious of systems of governance but not in an over-the-top conspiracy theory way. [...] This book enabled me to... (Source)

Igor Debatur Question: What five books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path & why? Answer: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche The Castle by Franz Kafka 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (Source)

Santiago Basulto And non-business is even harder, but I’d probably choose 1984; its power and narrative are just amazing. (Source)

Stephane Grand Everybody, whether they decide to spend their lives in a police state or not, needs to read 1984. It is a book about moral choices, being different, and being broken. (Source)

Sol Orwell Question: What books had the biggest impact on you? Perhaps changed the way you see things or dramatically changed your career path. Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 (though Huxley's Brave New World is a better reflection of today's society). (Source)

Andra Zaharia These books and their core ideas have stuck with me the most and continue to guide me when I hit crossroads along the way. (Source)

Juan Mendez It alerts us to the danger of unfettered state power, which under any circumstance always ends up committing violations against individuals. (Source)

Jordan Peterson [Jordan Peterson recommended this book on his website.] (Source)

P J O’Rourke It’s eerily predictive of the sort of video camera surveillance world that we now live in. It would be interesting to update 1984 and make all of the things that Orwell foresaw more annoying than dangerous. (Source)

D J Taylor In terms of how technology is working in our modern surveillance powers, it’s a terrifyingly prophetic book in some of its implications for 21st-century human life. Orwell would deny that it was prophecy; he said it was a warning. But in fact, distinguished Orwell scholar Professor Peter Davis once made a list of all the things that Orwell got right, and it was a couple of fairly long paragraphs, and it was really rather terrifying. (Source)

Rankings by Category

1984 is ranked in the following categories:

#4 in 10th Grade
#4 in 11th Grade
#3 in 12th Grade
#4 in 15-Year-Old
#4 in 16-Year-Old
#3 in 17-Year-Old
#3 in 18-Year-Old
#4 in Abstract
#3 in Adult
#1 in Amazon Free
#3 in Banned
#6 in Bibliography
#1 in Bucket List
#2 in Catalog
#2 in Censorship
#3 in Class
#1 in Classic
#1 in Classic Sci-Fi
#4 in Classical
#1 in Collection
#3 in Communism
#3 in Conspiracy
#2 in Controversial
#2 in Copenhagen
#1 in Dramatic
#1 in Dystopian
#1 in English
#2 in Entertaining
#2 in Entertainment
#4 in Facebook
#6 in Farm Animal
#4 in Fascism
#2 in Folio Society
#6 in Futurism
#1 in Gilmore Girls
#2 in Goodreads
#3 in High School
#2 in High School Reading
#2 in Important
#3 in Influential
#6 in Intellectual
#2 in Interesting
#2 in Kindle Unlimited
#1 in Learning English
#2 in Leather
#1 in Leather Bound
#1 in Library
#5 in Life Changing
#2 in Literary
#1 in Literature
#3 in London
#2 in Loneliness
#1 in Mindfuck
#1 in Modern
#2 in Modern Classic
#6 in Modernism
#2 in Modernist
#2 in Must-Read
#1 in Novel
#1 in Online
#4 in Options
#2 in Paperback
#1 in Politics
#5 in Possession
#1 in Poster
#2 in Propaganda
#5 in Quarantine
#4 in Rated
#5 in Recent
#6 in Recommended
#6 in Revolution
#1 in Roman
#2 in Satire
#2 in Sci-Fi Horror
#2 in Science Fiction
#6 in Social
#3 in Socialism
#1 in Spelling
#6 in Story
#2 in Summer Reading
#5 in Suspenseful
#1 in Thought-Provoking
#2 in To-Read
#3 in Top Ten
#5 in Trigger Warning
#1 in Twisted
#4 in University
#1 in Utopian

Similar Books

If you like 1984, check out these similar top-rated books:

Learn: What makes Shortform summaries the best in the world?

Why ‘1984’ is still relevant today — but not for the reason you may expect

Copy Link URL Copied!

Of course Big Brother isn’t just watching us anymore — he’s listening to our cell phone and FaceTime conversations, friending us on Facebook, following us on Instagram (just as we are often following Him). He’s introducing us to our next partner or spouse on dating and “hook-up” apps, bombarding us with spurious and inaccurate information through jargon and euphemism (“border control” as a code for family separation, or “climate change” as a substitute for “climate collapse”), and instructing us — even from as far away as other continents – about who we should vote for and, more important, who we shouldn’t. Big Brother is no longer simply a set of shadowy, avuncular, half-smiling eyes on living-room posters and street-side billboards; he now reserves a virtual space at all our family gatherings, and tells us what to do and buy long before we had the inclination to do or buy anything.

Good ol’ Big Brother. He got a lot of bad press over the decades — but that was before we found out he was already one of us.

While times have changed, the things that worried George Orwell haven’t changed at all. The most important thing to know about “future-thinking” “utopian” and/or “dystopian” novels is that they are never really about the future at all; instead these novels are about the world that surrounded the author. That is why one of the unproven rumors about “1984” — as explored in Dorian Lynskey’s “The Ministry of Truth,” a respectful and intelligent “biography” of a novel — is that the title was merely a transposition of its publication date, 1948. In other words, in Orwell’s eyes, “1984” was well already well-established four decades before it got here.

For Orwell, the horror of totalitarianism was not that someone would impose it on you, but rather that you might be all-too-prepared to submit.

— Scott Bradfield

Born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 — he only adopted the now iconic professional pseudonym of Orwell in 1933 — the writer was the son of politically mixed parents: His half-French mother “mixed with suffragettes and Fabians,” and his father was a relatively bland mid-level civil servant. Orwell went on to become a consistently radical critic of his world who always appreciated the conventional pleasures of middle-class and working-class life; his novels and essays are thick with appreciations for everything from drinking tea and smoking cigarettes to the novels of Dickens and Kipling — and the “naughty” seaside postcards of Donald McGill. After skidding along unillustriously as a “scholarship” boy at Eton College, he joined the Imperial Police in Burma, where he quickly learned what it felt like to wear a uniform — and how it could make you think and feel things you might consider repugnant when you weren’t wearing it. (Check out his great personal essays about that period, “A Hanging” or “Shooting an Elephant” — for Orwell, the horror of totalitarianism was not that someone would impose it on you, but rather that you might be all-too-prepared to submit.) Eventually, he went to London, where he wrote productively for the left-wing press — while never missing an opportunity to criticize its failures – and after a brief adventure fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War, secured a full-time job working for the BBC, a monolithically imposing cultural force that Orwell later satirized as “The Ministry of Truth.”

In many ways, Orwell’s genius was best exemplified by his essays and journalism — and the success of his most famous novels (it may be impossible to avoid either “1984” or “Animal Farm” in most high school curricula) has often obscured the impact of the things he said. For example, he wasn’t — as students are often mis-taught — concerned simply with the oppressive forces of Stalin or “socialism,” but rather with almost every “ism” that manipulated truth through the misuse of language and political propaganda. Even more confusing, “1984’s” message has often been appropriated by the very types of organizations that Orwell despised, thus becoming, as Lynskey writes, “a book that almost any political faction could claim.” It has been held up as a warning about the perils of imperialism, capitalism, socialism and fascism; it has been lauded by both the John Birch Society — who used the numbers 1-9-8-4 as the last four digits of its phone number — and the Black Panthers, who taught Orwell in their Oakland Community School.

Eddie Albert played Winston Smith in the episode "1984" of the CBS anthology series 'Studio One," from 1953.

The novel has inspired at least one mediocre Hollywood production (starring the weirdly miscast Edmund O’Brien in 1956 ), several BBC adaptations, and the more interesting Michael Redford film starring John Hurt and released, appropriately enough, in 1984. And it has gone on to live a life far beyond its title in Terry Gilliam’s comic nightmare 1985 film “Brazil” — “I hadn’t read 1984,” Gilliam said, “but we all know what it is” — and as a successful product-branding Ridley Scott television commercial for Apple in 1983, wherein a woman in a tank-top saves the world from conformity with a hammer. The word “1984” has even entered our own contemporary version of “Newspeak” as a shorthand term that simply means — “bad future.” And who can disagree with the idea that we should all avoid living in it?

Orwell’s “1984” has been applauded by everyone from Noam Chomsky to Lee Harvey Oswald — and regarded suspiciously by Stalinists and J. Edgar Hoover and Christopher Hitchens alike — and the novel has not lost any of its power today. Many things have changed since Orwell wrote this terrifying, beautifully written and, yes, extremely funny book. But Orwell’s world where “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength” — sounding much like a cable news panel filled with angry pundits — rings truer now more than ever.

“The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s ‘1984’”

Dorian Lynskey

Doubleday; 355 pp., $28.95

Bradfield is a writer whose novels include “The History of Luminous Motion” and “Dazzle Resplendent: Adventures of a Misanthropic Dog.”

Review: A worshipful biopic of the 40th president, ‘Reagan’ is historical hooey — and a slog too

Aug. 30, 2024

President Joe Biden speaks before signing a $95 billion Ukraine aid package that also includes support for Israel, Taiwan, and other allies, in the State Dining Room of the White House, Wednesday, April 24, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Column: Don’t let Big Tech monopolies kill local news. Democracy is at risk

Aug. 19, 2024

Chris Nashawaty, author of "The Future Was Now."

The summer of ’82 changed sci-fi cinema forever

July 24, 2024

Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. reading and talking.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Elon Musk arrives at the 10th Breakthrough Prize Ceremony on April 13, 2024 in Los Angeles.

‘How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter’ authors say platform is ‘a tool for controlling political discourse’

A cynical person in front of a giant eye trying to practice hopeful skepticism

Cynicism is everywhere and it’s making us sick. Is this the antidote?

Sept. 12, 2024

NEW YORK -- AUGUST 27, 2024: Joanna "JoJo" Levesque, whose memoir comes out September 17.

With a new memoir 20 years after breakout hit ‘Leave (Get Out),’ JoJo is back in control

The week’s bestselling books, Sept. 15

Sept. 11, 2024

Health, Family & Personal Development

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera, scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the authors

1984 | George Orwell Paperback – 31 December 2022

Save extra with 2 offers, 10 days replacement.

Replacement Reason	Replacement Period	Replacement Policy
Physical Damage, Defective, Wrong and Missing Item	10 days from delivery	Replacement

Replacement Instructions

Purchase options and add-ons

Print length 256 pages
Language English
Publisher Arushi book enterprises
Publication date 31 December 2022
Reading age 13 years and up
Dimensions 22 x 14.5 x 1.8 cm
ISBN-10 8119756878
ISBN-13 978-8119756872
See all details

Frequently bought together

Products related to this item

World’s Greatest Books For Personal Growth & Wealth (Set of 4 Books) : Perfect Motivational Gift Set

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Arushi book enterprises; Arushi book enterprises first edition (31 December 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 8119756878
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-8119756872
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 13 years and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 250 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 22 x 14.5 x 1.8 cm
Net Quantity ‏ : ‎ 1 Piece
Packer ‏ : ‎ Arushi book enterprises
Generic Name ‏ : ‎ Book
#48 in Self-Help for Abuse

About the authors

George orwell.

George Orwell is one of England's most famous writers and social commentators. Among his works are the classic political satire Animal Farm and the dystopian nightmare vision Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell was also a prolific essayist, and it is for these works that he was perhaps best known during his lifetime. They include Why I Write and Politics and the English Language. His writing is at once insightful, poignant and entertaining, and continues to be read widely all over the world.

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there.

At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.

It was around this time that Orwell's unique political allegory Animal Farm (1945) was published. The novel is recognised as a classic of modern political satire and is simultaneously an engaging story and convincing allegory. It was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which finally brought him world-wide fame. Nineteen Eighty-Four's ominous depiction of a repressive, totalitarian regime shocked contemporary readers, but ensures that the book remains perhaps the preeminent dystopian novel of modern literature.

Orwell's fiercely moral writing has consistently struck a chord with each passing generation. The intense honesty and insight of his essays and non-fiction made Orwell one of the foremost social commentators of his age. Added to this, his ability to construct elaborately imaginative fictional worlds, which he imbued with this acute sense of morality, has undoubtedly assured his contemporary and future relevance.

George Orwell died in London in January 1950.

ABHIJEET GUPTA

Author shows rich interest in Political Philosophers and their Philosophies. Book "Political Philosophers and Philosophies" is his first short E-Book available on Amazon Kindle.

He has written Political Science optional book in both English and Hindi medium.

PDS 4 Books

The only place you will need for any book you want.

Customer reviews

5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 67% 23% 7% 2% 2% 67%
5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 67% 23% 7% 2% 2% 23%
5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 67% 23% 7% 2% 2% 7%
5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 67% 23% 7% 2% 2% 2%
5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 67% 23% 7% 2% 2% 2%

Customers say

Customers find the book suspenseful, scary, and brilliant. They say it offers profound insights and is a great value for money. Readers mention the book is relevant today and timeless. They appreciate the perfect binding and crisp white pages. However, some find the first half tiresome and the story quality disappointing.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book suspenseful, brilliant, and startling. They say it's a must-read for dystopian lovers. Readers also mention the book is horrifying and a classic work of fiction.

"...This book blew my mind with its gripping story and eerie portrayal of a dystopian future ...." Read more

"...see such dystopian future in our life time , but this book gives a decent idea about what would have happened if we lived in such a world...." Read more

"...This book is a slow burn. It makes you wait by describing the emotions and the rollercoaster of thoughts that come and go through our main character..." Read more

"...It serves as a terrifying warning against totalitarian regimes ...." Read more

Customers find the book great value for money. They mention it deals with war-like stuff.

" Very good book for a low price . Delivered on time!" Read more

"...And corners were damaged hear and there. Good enough for the price ." Read more

"...Also, the copy I bought was great, with perfect binding and not at all costly ! The publisher 'Amazing reads' is doing an awesome job...." Read more

"...Book was in good condition and the price is also good , the pages are of decent quality. Overall I'm happy. 😊..." Read more

Customers find the book thought-provoking. They mention it offers profound insights on the nature of power and governance. Readers also say it alters their minds and forces them to think. They say it's an unforgettable exploration of the human spirit in the face of tyranny. Reader also mention the book has taught them valuable lessons and made them realize certain things.

"...a great book to start with if you are a beginner and it makes you think in so many levels . Written in 1940s yet relevant till date...." Read more

"...Orwell's writing is so vivid and thought-provoking , it kept me hooked from start to finish...." Read more

"...1984" is a thought-provoking and unforgettable exploration of the human spirit in the face of tyranny." Read more

" Thought provoking book that everyone should read, parallels with the current state of the world" Read more

Customers find the book relevant today, saying it's a timeless epic. They also mention the themes are timeless and relevant.

"This is definitely a great book to start with if you are a beginner and it makes you think in so many levels...." Read more

"...what is surprising is that this book was published in 1949 and still relevant ...." Read more

"...The themes are timeless and relevant , making this book just as important today as it was when it was first published in 1949...." Read more

"its the best novel based on dystopian theme and its still relevant in today's world ...." Read more

Customers like the book binding. They mention it's perfect, top-notch, and well-bound.

"...quality of the package , the pages are of okayish quality, the binding is also good . I got it @109/- during the july sale." Read more

"...Rating: 5/5⁣⁣Also, the copy I bought was great, with perfect binding and not at all costly!..." Read more

"...The flop is bad and you'll have to hold the book tightly to read it. Apart from that, the spine is sturdy and paper quality is good...." Read more

"Such a clear depiction of a Totalitarian state. Quite gripping as well as scary!" Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the readability of the book. Some mention it's incredibly written, beautifully narrated, and captivating. Others say it'd be difficult to read, has few spelling mistakes, and is complicated for beginners.

"... Orwell's writing is so vivid and thought-provoking, it kept me hooked from start to finish...." Read more

"...The margins are short, making it difficult to annotate . The flop is bad and you'll have to hold the book tightly to read it...." Read more

"...loved the overall experience, the language used and sentence structure is so captivating it makes you just wanna keep reading it on and on." Read more

"...all, there is nothing to dislike about this book because the book is so well written that it gives you a feeling of reading somebody's biography..." Read more

Customers find the book boring, disappointing, and a waste of time. They mention the first half is tiresome and repetitive at times. Readers also say the book is not easy to digest and doesn't serve a purpose worth its length.

"This book is definitely not for entertainment purposes . I felt like dropping the idea of reading the book in between multiple times...." Read more

"...'s book (within the book) was a bit too stretched and did not serve a purpose worth it's length. Still '1984' is worthy of 5 stars. ⁣⁣⁣⁣..." Read more

"...And the first half the book (and to some extent the whole book) is fairly boring , cumbersome and a drag...." Read more

"...But it starts little slow and some chapters are boring but as it proceeds it becomes interesting, gripping. It is historic fiction...." Read more

Customers find the story confusing, unsettling, and complex. They also say the book is not for the weak-hearted and especially not for kids. Readers mention the story is thought-provoking but tedious at times.

"Overall the book is great but little difficult in understanding . Seemed a long book but only of 170 pages. 😀..." Read more

"...For me it’s little tough to understand few chapters though but I still liked it." Read more

"...Period dates mentioned in the book are too confusing and are definitely fictitious. I don't know why." Read more

"The climax was superb , the story written doesnt seem groundbreaking cuz the world does look like this book rn, but still, enjoyed it" Read more

Reviews with images

Value for money

Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from India

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

Press Releases
Amazon Science
Sell on Amazon
Sell under Amazon Accelerator
Protect and Build Your Brand
Amazon Global Selling
Supply to Amazon
Become an Affiliate
Fulfilment by Amazon
Advertise Your Products
Amazon Pay on Merchants
Your Account
Returns Centre
Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
100% Purchase Protection
Amazon App Download

Conditions of Use & Sale
Privacy Notice
Interest-Based Ads

1984 (Portuguese Edition)

By: George Orwell
Narrated by: Ricardo Mendes
Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins

Failed to add items

Add to cart failed., add to wish list failed., remove from wishlist failed., adding to library failed, follow podcast failed, unfollow podcast failed.

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $9.07

No default payment method selected.

We are sorry. we are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method, publisher's summary.

1984 , escrito por George Orwell, é um romance distópico publicado em 1949 que retrata um futuro sombrio onde o totalitarismo domina. A história se passa em uma sociedade controlada pelo Partido, liderado pela figura do Grande Irmão, que monitora cada aspecto da vida das pessoas. Winston Smith, o protagonista, trabalha para o governo, mas aos poucos começa a questionar a opressão imposta pelo regime.

O governo manipula a verdade, reescreve a história e vigia seus cidadãos por meio de uma vigilância incessante. Liberdade de pensamento é inexistente, e qualquer forma de dissidência é brutalmente reprimida. Winston se rebela em segredo, buscando a verdade e lutando contra o conformismo, mas logo descobre que escapar do controle total do Partido pode ser impossível.

Orwell explora temas profundos como o controle da mente, a manipulação da linguagem e a opressão política, tornando 1984 uma crítica poderosa às sociedades autoritárias e à perda da individualidade. Este livro continua sendo uma obra impactante e relevante para os debates modernos sobre liberdade, privacidade e o poder dos governos.

Please note: This audiobook is in Portuguese.

Unabridged Audiobook
Categories: Literature & Fiction

All the Colors of the Dark

By: Chris Whitaker

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
Length: 14 hrs and 37 mins
Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 4,313
Performance 5 out of 5 stars 4,210
Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 4,210

1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Muhammad Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing. When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges—Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake. Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another.

5 out of 5 stars

Best book of 2024

By Jmo930 on 07-04-24

Atomic Habits

An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

By: James Clear

Narrated by: James Clear
Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
Overall 5 out of 5 stars 137,378
Performance 5 out of 5 stars 112,387
Story 5 out of 5 stars 111,333

No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving - every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change.

start here, if you are looking to achieve in life

By NL on 10-22-18

By: Leeanne Slade

Narrated by: Sam Claflin, Daisy Edgar Jones
Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,603
Performance 5 out of 5 stars 1,583
Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,583

Five Years Earlier: Henry Dunne knows three things: that agreeing to host this raucous house party was a terrible idea, that he absolutely cannot show up to his nursing shift tomorrow with a hangover, and that the beautiful redhead in the corner will be sleeping in his bed tonight.

This is NOT a Romcom!

By Amazon Customer on 08-16-24

The God of the Woods

By: Liz Moore

Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,325
Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,222
Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,222

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

Good story telling

By Ri on 07-12-24

The Anxious Generation

How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

By: Jonathan Haidt

Narrated by: Sean Pratt, Jonathan Haidt
Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
Overall 5 out of 5 stars 2,460
Performance 5 out of 5 stars 2,344
Story 5 out of 5 stars 2,344

There is no bigger public health story now than the collapse in youth mental health. The numbers are terrifying and dominate our headlines. There has been much debate over how we got here, and what to do next, and bestselling author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is at the white-hot center of that discourse. Haidt has spent his career speaking wisdom and truth into the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the perfect storm contributing to a public health emergency for Gen Z.

A Parenting Book for the 2020's

By Looks and feels great. Even has little pads to prevent scratching on 03-29-24

Good Energy

The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health
By: Casey Means MD, Calley Means
Narrated by: Casey Means MD
Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 442
Performance 5 out of 5 stars 414
Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 413

Our ability to prevent and reverse these conditions—and feel incredible today —is under our control and simpler than we think. The key is our metabolic function—the most important and least understood factor in our overall health. As Dr. Casey Means explains in this book, nearly every health problem we face can be explained by how well the cells in our body create and use energy. To live free from frustrating symptoms and life-threatening disease, we need our cells to be optimally powered so that they can create “good energy,” the essential fuel that impacts every aspect of our wellbeing.

2 out of 5 stars

overzealous author

By Anonymous User on 05-20-24

By: Casey Means MD , and others

What listeners say about 1984 (Portuguese Edition)

Reviews - please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews., audible.com reviews, amazon reviews, please sign in to report this content.

You'll still be able to report anonymously.

IMAGES

Book review: How 1984 is as important of a read now more than ever
George Orwell's 1984
Amazon.com: 1984 by George Orwell: Orwell Expert Book Review (Audible
ChatterFox: Review
BOOK REVIEW: 1984 by George Orwell
1984

VIDEO

1984
1984
1984 by George Orwell, Book 2 Chapter 4 #story #shorts #short
1984, George Orwell
Book Review of 1984 By George Orwell.#dystopianfuture #bookreview #georgeorwell #bookrecomendations
1984 George Orwell

COMMENTS

1984 Book Review: George Orwell's Stunning Novel
Book Title: 1984 Book Description: 1984, is a dystopian novel that tells the story of Winston Smith and warns of the dangers of a totalitarian government that rules through fear, surveillance, propaganda and brainwashing. Book Author: George Orwell Book Edition: Signet Classics Edition Book Format: Paperback Publisher - Organization: Secker & Warburg Date published: June 8, 1949
1984 by George Orwell: Read TIME's Original 1949 Review of the Book
June 8, 2015 8:30 AM EDT. G eorge Orwell was already an established literary star when his masterwork Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on this day in 1949, but that didn't stop TIME's ...
1984 Book Review
Our review: Parents say (23 ): Kids say (79 ): Narrated with infinite precision, 1984 is one of the most famous dystopian satires in the English language. Its vocabulary -- "doublethink," "Big Brother," "down the Memory Hole," "Thought Police," "unperson" -- has become part of popular culture. Winston Smith's quest for freedom under the gaze of ...
1984 by George Orwell, book of a lifetime: An absorbing, deeply
Culture Books Reviews. 1984 by George Orwell, book of a lifetime: An absorbing, deeply affecting political thriller. The novel creates a world so plausible, so complete that to read it is to ...
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighr is an astonishingly good book which practically (almost single-handedly) created and defined the 'dystopian novel' genre. This is undoubtedly the definitive dystopian novel which stands astride the genre like a colossus - head and shoulders above the rest. Written in the year 1948 and first published in ...
1984, by George Orwell: On Its Enduring Relevance
What 1984 means today. The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984, by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation ...
Book Review
George Orwell's 1984 is a grim read that tells of a future in which something has gone horribly wrong in society resulting the extreme oppression of the citizens of at least one super state. It might be most famous for exploring the idea of technological mass surveillance but at its core it is a book ... Book Review - 1984, by George Orwell ...
Orwell on the Future
In his 1949 review, Lionel Trilling writes that George Orwell's "1984" is about a state power that was coercing, not cosseting, its citizens into soullessness.
Why '1984' Is a 2017 Must-Read
The dystopia described in George Orwell's nearly 70-year-old novel "1984" suddenly feels all too familiar. A world in which Big Brother (or maybe the National Security Agency) is always ...
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel written in 1948. Often a standard text in school for teenagers, 1984 is many people's first introduction to totalitarianism. Ominously prescient in some ways, (such as the scope for surveillance to reach into our lives through the ubiquity of screens) and wide off the mark in others (Big Brother ...
A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, completed in 1948 and published a year later, is a classic example of dystopian fiction. Indeed, it's surely the most famous dystopian novel in the world, even if its ideas are known by far more people than have actually read it. (According to at least…
1984 Book Summary
Our detailed review and analysis of George Orwell's '1984'. Explore the themes of totalitarianism, surveillance, and resistance in this dystopian classic. Understand character dynamics, plot intricacies, and Orwell's warning about the dangers of unchecked government power. Perfect for students, educators, and fans of classic literature.
1984
1984 also known as Nineteen-Eighty-Four written by George Orwell has been reviewed by Focus on the Family's marriage and parenting magazine. Plot Summary. ... Book reviews cover the content, themes and worldviews of fiction books, not their literary merit, and equip parents to decide whether a book is appropriate for their children. ...
1984 by George Orwell
Title: Nineteen-Eighty-Four: A Novel, later republished as 1984. When/where written: Orwell wrote the book in Jura, Scotland from 1945-1949. Published: June 1949. Literary Period: Late Modernism. Genre: Novel / Dystopian / Science Fiction. Point-of-View: Third-person omniscient. Setting: London/Oceania in 1984.
The Making of '1984,' George Orwell's Nightmare Vision of a World
In 1946, Orwell moved to the island of Jura, where, at the age of 45, he completed "1984" shortly before succumbing to tuberculosis. Lynskey focuses much of his book on the origins and the ...
1984 by George Orwell
Author interviews, book reviews and lively book commentary are found here. Content includes books from bestselling, midlist and debut authors. The Book Report Network. Our Other Sites. Bookreporter; ... 1984 by George Orwell. Publication Date: April 1, 1983; Genres: Science Fiction; Paperback: 304 pages; Publisher: Plume; ISBN-10: 0452262933 ...
1984
George Orwell's 1984 has been a timeless classic, yet there is something contemporary about it. Fascinated by its constant appeal for so many generations, I decided to take part in the conspiracy myself. Completing 100 pages a day of an ebook didn't feel like an achievement till I did not reach the appendix of the work.
Book Reviews: 1984, by George Orwell (Updated for 2021)
With extraordinary relevance and renewed popularity, George Orwell's 1984 takes on new life in this hardcover edition. "Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power."—The New Yorker. In 1984, London is a grim city in the ...
Book review: How 1984 is as important of a read now more than ever
Well, that book came along 71 years ago. If you've never read George Orwell's 1984, you're in for a real treat. And, if you've ever read George Orwell's 1984, you're in for a real treat. See also: 14 light reads to dive into while you're stuck in isolation; Five classic books to devour on a rainy weekend
Why '1984' is still relevant today
Even more confusing, "1984's" message has often been appropriated by the very types of organizations that Orwell despised, thus becoming, as Lynskey writes, "a book that almost any ...
1984
Absolutely loved reading 1984 by George Orwell! This book blew my mind with its gripping story and eerie portrayal of a dystopian future. Orwell's writing is so vivid and thought-provoking, it kept me hooked from start to finish. The way he captures the oppressive atmosphere and the struggles of the characters is just incredible.
George Orwell's 1984 immersive show to return to London
1984: A Unique Theatre Experience returns to London this winter for a strictly limited 12-week run at Hackney Town Hall. George Orwell's dystopian novel is reimagined in this thrilling new immersive show from director Jack Reardon with a script adapted from George Orwell's novel by Adam Taub.
1984 (Portuguese Edition) by George Orwell
1984, escrito por George Orwell, é um romance distópico publicado em 1949 que retrata um futuro sombrio onde o totalitarismo domina. A história se passa em uma sociedade controlada pelo Partido, liderado pela figura do Grande Irmão, que monitora cada aspecto da vida das pessoas. ... A Parenting Book for the 2020's ... Reviews - Please ...