Customer Reviews

Three by Ira Levin

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I am not a fan of Rosemary's Baby, and anyway, it's been reviewed plenty o' times. And you know about the Stepford wives, But...

If you haven't read Levin's This Perfect Day, the third novel in this collection, you are in for a big treat. This is a science-fiction futuristic novel about a post-modern age society where disease, deformity, discrimination and any other social ill have been cured. A giant computer controls breeding, marriage, career and every other conceivable aspect of life. For those areas of human nature not controllable by computer, there's indoctrination and "treatments." The treatment is a weekly hypospray of immunizations, birth control, hormones and LPK, a lithium-based tranquilizer that dulls the baser human urges and promotes peaceful behavior. And if anyone experiences even the slightest "friction", there is your personal advisor to monitor your behavior, and adjust your meds.

The hero of the book, Chip, is a square peg in a round hole. He meets a few other such misfits and the novel is off to a wonderful adventure. The theme is individual freedom, overweening power and a dysutopian society where peace and prosperity come at a high price.

Worth reading. Don't miss it.

I loved This Perfect Day by Ira Levin. It is the one story that has me thinking that we should not trust government, computers and drugs. This shows what happens when we forget who we are and what happens when we don't question what the people we trust are doing. Find this story if you can it is well worth the search!

I was given a copy of this volume by my father, who found it at a yardsale. I started off cautiously with "Rosemary's Baby"--which scared the hell out of me several successive nights in a row, but it still had me gripped, I must've ploughed through the last half of it all in one sitting.

"Stepford Wives" is also good and a standard classic by Levin, but it paled in comparison to "Rosemary's Baby" and, what I considered the real masterpiece of the work, "This Perfect Day."

I am a huge fan of "1984" and "Brave New World," but, honestly, I think both are nothing compared to "This Perfect Day." The work is just so amazing and more emotional that Orwell or Huxely, it's stranger in ways, perhaps even a little more disturbing and, for most of the work, seems even more hopeless (at least things seemed to be going good for Winston and John the Savage in the other dystopias!). It is beautiful, wonderful, chilling and thought-provoking. I have reccomended this book to almost everyone and wish it were back in print so they could all get it more easily. The other two books in this volume I may only mention as afterthought.

Good author. I can't believe This Perfect Day is out of print. It was required reading when I went to school along with Animal Farm and 1984.

Pretty Orwellian, if so. But this book should be a contender. It's always fashionable to dismiss popular literature, and I'm not going to claim that Levin is our generation's Dickens -- but his plotting and pacing are top-notch, and his restrained narrative is a lesson in drawing the reader in.