Carol B. reviewed on 8/27/2011

I wanted to get into some classics this summer, and 1984 was the first I dug into. It truly was an amazing book of its time, moreso when facts about Orwell's life have come to life in the past decades. I lived through 1984, Orwell lived through the Russian Revolution, intense change in society in Europe from 1910 through the 1950s, World War 2, the Great Depression. One major overriding theme in this book is the lack of privacy, the reaching of society into every aspect of the individual's life. While we may scoff at the thought that our modern television, which exists in 99.9% of households around the world would be both a camera and a telescreen, we do have that now in the form of smartphones. Perhaps 1984 was more about 1948, and postwar Europe, the realization of what Stalin had done, of the costs of winning World War 2. In any case, it is a great book and deserves to be read and can continue to teach us so much.

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