Review written for ClubReading.com by Linda
(Please note: I did not read this book; I listened to the unabridged narration by Alexander Spencer. It made a six hour drive fly by!)
I had not returned to Bradbury’s tale of the ultimate censorship since I was 17. Surprisingly, this book still holds up very well, even given the large number of years between the writing and present day.
The beginning and middle of this tale is set in a world very similar to ours, with a few technological advances, and a few of our advances missing (very few computers, for example). Bradbury takes firemen, and has them setting books on fire. In this culture, all books are banned. What surprised, and delighted me, was the prominence of television as the entertainment media. In fact, in this story, the television has become, literally, “the relatives.”
When I read this book as a teenager, I came away with the main idea of censorship is bad. Seeing it from the prospective of an adult, one who does not own a television, I see the message being more about the dangers of not thinking, rather than just about books. Access to books, without the ability to think, as the hero of this books points out, is useless. Montag, our hero, even specifically asks an old professor to teach him to think.
I suppose the character of Clarice, who first opens Montag’s eyes to a different way to see life, was intended to help teenagers identify with the book, but she reminds me so much of the “outsiders” of today, everyone from computer hackers to the current rappers. One of the most interesting comments Clarice makes is that her uncle remembers when children didn’t kill children. So do I.