Equality [Paperback]

Edward Bellamy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2002

This marvelous book is the sequel to Bellamy's Looking Backward, his utopian novel of several years earlier, where a young man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes in a utopian year 2000, where all social ills are solved. This novel continues the thread of his utopian vision. Equality begins when Julian West returns to the year 2000 to continue his education. The book describes an ideal society in that year. Equality was published just before his death and was not received nearly as well as Looking Backward. Bellamy was born in 1850 in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. As a young man he studied law and entered the bar, but never practiced. He was a journalist and social theorist as well as a novelist. Bellamy's theory of public capitalism would greatly affect American political thought in the 20th century.

Product Details

• Paperback: 424 pages
• Publisher: Fredonia Books (NL) (September 30, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1410100383
• ISBN-13: 978-1410100382
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,464,198 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Completely unreadable, do not buy this edition!, April 5, 2010

By 

Alex Rowell (Valdosta, GA, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

At the onset of this edition of "Equality," the publisher attempts to explain why the rest of the book is an unreadable, haphazard mess of random letters, spacing, and punctuation. Apparently this book was scanned using (very poor) optical character recognition. The publisher, General Books LLC, did not find that they needed to edit this in the slightest. As a result, your reading experience will be flooded with phrases like this, an actual quote from this book: "owner's v legal righL af.-e?eciijig-the occupant." The chapters are also not organized properly, paragraphs are spaced terribly, and unnecessary line breaks run amok.

Save yourself the hassle of trying to interpret this machine-scanned garbage, and buy a legitimate copy of Equality from a legitimate publisher.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Equality" has formed a critical part of my thinking on social justice, August 15, 2009

By 

Michael L. Baird "Author "Engineering You... (Morro Bay, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Equality (Paperback)

50 years ago my father gave me his copy of Bellamy's Equality - a well-worn often read tome in our family. It formed a critical part of my thinking ever since, and has guided me in making fundamental decisions about what is right and wrong, good and evil, and just and unjust. Anyone interested in social justice, or the abuse of political, religious, or financial power, should read and internalize what Bellamy was visualizing in his view of an ideal society in the late 1800's, based in part on his earlier work on his looking back from the Twenty-first Century Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (Penny Books).

10 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still a Vision for Tomarrow, May 12, 2005

By 

Barry Floyd "Secular Humanist" (New Jersey, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Equality (Paperback)

In sharp contrast to the raving, misanthopic Capitalist who gave this excellent book one star, Bellamy laid out his vision for a humanistic society... one which was natural and beneficial to humankind, rather than one which takes advantage of the poor, weak, or less talented. It is sad that Bellamy's vision for the 20th century only saw some chance of coming true with the New Deal and some of the social movements of the 1960s. Today, when crony coporate capitalism, fundamentalist religion, and evil seekers of oil, money and power rule the mindset of this once hopeful country (USA), the chance for humanism is slim indeed. If only the likes of those misanthropic capitalists who mock and distort Bellamy were to dissapear, we'd have a much healthier planet.

And by the way, what we saw in the former USSR or in China today is NOT what Bellamy had in mind; but itself a misantropic, power-based dictatorship-based government which was/is just as unhumanistic as the U.S. is now.