Customer Reviews

Why I Write (Penguin Great Ideas)

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Why I Write is a collection of four pieces by one of the best writers of the twentieth century. George Orwell is best known for his political fables Animal Farm and 1984, but was also a prolific essayist and author of numerous short stories, many of them based on his own experiences in British-controlled Burma. This books includes three essays--"Why I Write", "The Lion and the Unicorn", and "Politics and the English Language"--and the short story "A Hanging."
"Why I Write" offers the reader a look into one great writer's motivations for writing, as Orwell lays out the only real reasons anyone writes. "The Lion and the Unicorn" is fascinating, not only for its often humorous descriptions of the British national character, but for the political ideas expressed in it and the knowledge, made clear by Orwell at the beginning, that this was written in the midst of the Blitz. "Politics and the English Language" is a brief guide to the fatal flaws of modern writing--all of which have lasted beyond Orwell--and how to mend them. "A Hanging" is reminiscent of another of Orwell's famous short stories, "Shooting the Elephant," as it describes an otherwise mundane action in ominous, metaphoric terms.
While hardly exhaustive, this collection of Orwell's essays is a good introduction to Orwell, his writings, and his political views. Makes very good reading for a trip, which is where I read it.
Highly recommended.

"Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind" (p.120). "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought" (p. 116).

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it," George Orwell wrote in 1946. Best known for his haunting novels on totalitarianism, Animal Farm (Signet Classics) (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Orwell (b. Eric Arthur Blair; 1903-50) was a political and cultural visionary in his anti-Stalinist writings. In his two dystopian novels, Orwell envisions a bleak society controlled by the state. His name ("Orwellian") has become synonymous with the government oppression depicted in 1984, and the euphemistic and misleading language employed by the government (e.g., "Ministry of Defence," "collateral damage," and "pacification") as a manipulative tool for its own political purposes. In his essay, "Politics and the English Language," Orwell emphasizes the importance of language that is clear and honest. (It should be noted that this review refers to the 2005 Penguin Great Ideas edition of WHY I WRITE, which includes the essays "Why I Write," "The Lion and the Unicorn, "A Hanging, and "Poloitics and the English Language.")

G. Merritt

In evaluating "Why I write?," I am not evaluating Orwell: he is - in my opinion - beyond evaluation. Brilliant, unorthodox, humanistically transparent - he is a model of existential integrity. In evaluating "Why I write?" I am offering an evaluation of this particular compilation of essays. I am trying to answer the question of "Why should I buy the 'Why I write?'"

This particular compilation of Orwell's essays consists of "Why I write?," The Lion and the Unicorn," "A Hanging," and "Politics and the English Language." As you might have already gleaned from you search, the books of Orwell's essays are all over the market place. This one - consisting of four iconic essays - is a great primer.

The "Why I write?" humbles with introspection and humanistic self-acceptance. "The Lion and the Unicorn" showcases Orwell's keen journalism and the capacity to be on the outside of the phenomenon in question, even when that phenomenon is his own culture. "A Hanging" is a normalizing glimpse into how we deal with our own mortality superimposed onto a social statement against capital punishment. And the "Politics and the English Language" is a brilliant examination of the human consciousness, a study of the interplay of thought and language, an anti-dote to propoganda, a treasure trove of linguistic hypotheses, and, if nothing else, a useful commentary on the rationale behind the "1984" Newspeak and Doublethink.

As such, this particular collection of Orwell's essays reveals the breadth of his thematic spectrum - without the biographical weight of more exhaustive essay compilations.


Pavel Somov, Ph.D.

Author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008)

Here is your chance to go into the thoughts and political beliefs of the famous writer George Orwell with the filter of his fictional writings removed. This work contains four short essays. In the first essay "Why I write" you really get an understanding of the man and his motivations to write. He is very candid in this essay and you get to know the man behind "Animal Farm" and "1984".

In his second essay "The Lion and the Unicorn" he lays bare his political beliefs. In this short work he lays out his thoughts about Communism, Fascism, and Socialism and the struggle between them in England during World War II. What I really liked about this essay is that he wrote it while bombs were falling on London and with the outcome of World War II still undecided. While I strongly disagree with Orwell's Socialist ideals, they may have been more appropriate for his time period in his country. I enjoyed reading his opinions and learning about the social situation at that time in history.

His third very brief essay tells about his witness to a hanging in Burma.

The final essay is excellent in its examples of how in his time writers using the English language were drifting away from clarity and into using metaphors, similes, and figures of speech. He calls for a return to the clear and precise use of the language. He writes of six rules that will make that happen.

If you enjoy George Orwell's writings, I believe you will enjoy this book.

This short (120 pages) book of 4 essays from one of the great modern writers is worth the read for three reasons:

1. The last essay, 'Politics and the English Language' should be required of all political writers and business writers as well. Though 50 years old it is equally pertinent today; well summarized in the 6 rules in the next to the last page.

2. The Hanging showed his descriptive skills, "Eight o'clock and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant barracks." His description of the hanging of a Hindu man had more clarity than any modern photograph.

3. The Lion and the Unicorn, the longest of the essays, described the state of the English culture and its challenge from the growing European Fascists. It is an excellent picture of the British before their moment of truth. "It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and the silly.... A family with the wrong members in control." " A nation trained to think hedonistically cannot survive amid peoples who work like slaves and breed like rabbits, and whose chief national industry is war." Orwell's solution is democratic socialism; more acceptable in its day, less convincing 50- years later with the hindsight of many failures in socialism.

These essays are valuable to students of writing and to those who want to know more about the background of a great modern writer known for the classics Animal Farm and 1984.

This review is based on the first of the four essays that are included in the book. In the essay "Why I Write", Orwell describes the factors that led him to be a writer.

He portrays him self as a lonely child who found comfort in writing poems and short stories. His personality was not, however, the most significant factor that made him a serious writer; it was the time into which he was born. The political turmoils of the 1930s made Orwell ideologically ambitious and created the political motivation to write. The Spanish civil war and Hitler's ascension led Orwell to the conclusion that totalitarianism was the greatest threat to humanity and that socialist Democracy was the political counterforce. Orwell's mission as a writer was to fight against the former and promote the latter.

The essay "Why I Write" is an account of the role of ideology in a writer's work. Orwell concludes that without the political motivation his prose and writings would have been "sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally".

For the writers of today, this essay stands as a remnant of the time where the world politics seemed bipolar and it was easy to choose a side. Orwell chose the anti totalitarian side. From there he found the purpose and vocation.

This book provides a good overview of who Orwell is, in terms of both a writer and a man, in his own words. He explains why he writes, his political views and the imporance he subscribes to political writing. If you are looking to fulfill your curiosity with respect to the above no other book does it better. The only weak spot of the book (why I give it 4 instead of 5 stars) is that it has references to many historical events/facts that, unless you are a student of history (particulary Orwell's times) are not common knowledge. The editors should have placed more footnotes to assist non-students of history. If you are very knowledgeable of the history of the times, however, it should be a five star book for you.

Although I grew tired of "The Lion and the Unicorn," the two other essays and the one short story made up for it and then some. It's a fantastic example of good writing and makes clear the reason why George Orwell, who died in 1950, is still a relevant writer today.

In the book, George Orwell, one of the most talented and gifted writers in the English world, depicts in a frank manner about his literary writing motives and how he reconciles aesthetic enthusiasm with his political purpose.

The book consists of 4 key chapters. Chapter 1 is a full introduction of his literary journey from childhood to adulthood. Orwell maintains that a writer's real experience in life can substantially determine his/her impulse to write (P.4). The four key motives in literary writing including sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose exist in different degree in different writers, depending very much on the atmosphere he/she is living. To Orwell, the key motive to write is that he intends to tell devastating truths about non-individual and public activities with his literary writing skills without humbug, purple passages, meaningless sentences, and decorative adjectives (P.10).

Chapter 2 is about English politics during the Second World War. As a key champion of democratic Socialism, Orwell criticized decadent hypocritical and privileged high class who dominated every aspect of political and economic life in England but they failed to resist any serious war attack by Fascism (P.35). He maintained that England should undertake a wholehearted political change (P.48) if people intended not to be conquered by Hitler. Democratic Socialism could centralize all goods of production for armament purpose and unite people from top to bottom due to approximate equal distribution of income (Pp.74-76).

Chapter 3 was a hanging case in Burma. Orwell uses his literary writing skills to narrate the hanging process of a Hindu condemned prisoner. This unhappy narration is full of detailed descriptions and arresting scenario, and also full of purple passages in which Orwell's literary writing skills are demonstrated. From the condemned cell where the hanged Hindu squatted at to the gallows where the prisoner's neck was hanged for execution, Orwell looked at this sudden life and death process with great unhappiness but smiles. Chapter 4 is a critique of the decadent English language. Orwell maintains that a good piece of political writing should avoid having difficult and useless phrases and jargons (P.120) and it should be clear and meaning and short in words (P.119). In this chapter, Orwell illustrates how academicians and political writers use operators, pretension diction, dying metaphors, and meaningless words (Pp.106-109) to make their works to be a sheer humbug.

Writing can be a very exhaustive and horrible struggle, particularly for those who aspire to write a book. This book is highly recommended to readers who intend to think hard about how to write.

This is a great little volume of three of Orwell's essays (aka Eric Blair essays). Unfortunately the product description page give the impression that more than three essays are included.