Customer Reviews

Equality (The Works Of Edward Bellamy)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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).

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.