| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780345342966 | | Publisher: Ballantine Books | | Publish Date: 2/1/1995 | | Buy.com Sku: 30049018 | | Item#: R23C2V | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 8664 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7H x 4.25L x 0.75T |
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| | | | "It was a pleasure to burn..." (from the first line) Nowadays firemen start fires. Fireman Guy Montag loves to rush to a fire and watch books burn up. Then he met a seventeen-year old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid, and a professor who told him of a future where people could think. And Guy Montag knew what he had to do....
Annotation:
In this classic of dystopian science fiction, censorship is so prevalent that "firemen" are entrusted with the task of burning books to keep the citizenry away from anything that might cause dissent. Suicides are commonplace, and people drug themselves with pills, thrills, and the meaningless programming that pours from four-wall television. Guy Montag is a fireman; he loves the act of burning, but he's never actually stopped to consider what it is he's burning. Nor has he ever stopped to consider whether his life contains any meaning, or happiness. Then he meets a strange girl named Clarisse, who encourages him to question everything. Inspired by Clarisse, Montag does two radical, forbidden things: he begins to read, and he begins to think. One of Bradbury's definitive works, FAHRENHEIT 451 is an amazingly prescient book, anticipating not only social but technological trends. Bradbury described a world where people would be surrounded--bombarded, in fact--by their televisions and personal sound systems, and where the threat of war is a sufficient excuse to limit freedom. Today, individual acts of censorship are continually flaring up around the country, and many people never even bother to pick up a book once they've finished their schooling. FAHRENHEIT 451 is the banner book for organizations fighting these trends--both censorship and simple apathy.
| Praise| "Bradbury's fictional world is a place of great heart and wisdom, a universe of huge imagination where nothing is off-limits. His work defies classification--it's not science fiction or fantasy or realism, but it has elements of all three. Like the best fairy tales, his stories take you to a place of Once Upon A Time where anything can and does happen....I was led back to FAHRENHEIT 451 after 9/11. It was a brilliant remedy for restoring my faith. In returning to Bradbury territory, I was reminded of just how important books are." - Alice Hoffman 07/15/2009 |
| Author Bio| Ray Bradbury | | Before he was 14, Ray Bradbury and his family moved several times to and from Waukegan, Illinois, where he was born, to Tucson, Arizona. In 1934 they moved to Los Angeles, where Bradbury has since spent most of life. After graduating from high school in 1938, he sold newspapers for four years on L. A. sidewalks, while publishing his own amateur science fiction magazine, his first story sale not coming until 1941. Turning his attention to full-time writing in 1943, Bradbury continued to write short stories, the best of which he compiled in 1947's DARK CARNIVAL collection. Through the 1950s and well into the 1960s, Bradbury was the reigning king of science fiction. Starting with the masterpiece THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (1950), Bradbury's output from this period is fairly littered with classics; FAHRENHEIT 451 (1951), the collections THE ILLUSTRATED MAN (1951) and THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN (1953), SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (1962), and the I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC collection (1969). Over his career, he has received numerous awards and honors, including having a crater on the moon named after his novel DANDELION WINE. His writing continued apace, but Bradbury began branching out in the 1960s, exploring scriptwriting, lecturing, and architecture; he served as a consultant on Walt Disney World's Epcot Center, the United States Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair, as well as on other structures around the country. Though not much of his written work has been explicitly "science fiction," it has often contained enough of an element of the fantastic that he is primarily considered to be a science fiction writer. Even so, Bradbury has earned a prominent place in the pantheon of American literature. |
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