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Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451: A Novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, September 23, 2003

by Ray Bradbury (Author)

22,220 ratings

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An anniversary edition, featuring a new introduction by the author, follows the classic tale of one man's experience of reawakening in a world beset by oppression and censorship in which books have been outlawed and reading is punishable by death. 15,000 first printing.

Print length

208 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Simon & Schuster
Publication date

September 23, 2003
Dimensions

5.62 x 0.8 x 8.44 inches
ISBN-10

0743247221
ISBN-13

978-0743247221
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Editorial Reviews

Review

The New York Times Frightening in its implications... Mr. Bradbury's account of this insane world, which bears many alarming resemblances to our own, is fascinating. -- Review

About the Author

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) was the author of more than three dozen books, including Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, as well as hundreds of short stories. He wrote for the theater, cinema, and TV, including the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick and the Emmy Award–winning teleplay The Halloween Tree, and adapted for television sixty-five of his stories for The Ray Bradbury Theater. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and numerous other honors.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (September 23, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743247221
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743247221
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.62 x 0.8 x 8.44 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,811,155 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,716 in Censorship & Politics
- #6,994 in Classic American Literature
- #43,155 in Classic Literature & Fiction

Customer Reviews:
22,220 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		78%
4 star		13%
3 star		5%
2 star		1%
1 star		2%

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Top reviews from the United States

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The Expert

If all you get out of this book is the "removal" of books from society to become more connected to our electronic devices I feel so bad for you

Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2017

This is a must read book!! But I will say that I have a totally different point of view to the story than what most, in fact, all the reviews and editorials I have seen. I am not a bookworm and so the idea that books are gone is not an apocalyptic idea. The book was written before the internet and the information age. It is WHY the books are burned and WHAT the books represent that should open your eyes and minds while reading this book.

If all you get out of this book is the "removal" of books from society to become more connected to our electronic devices I feel so bad for you.

The point of burning the books is explained. I might give just a couple of spoilers, but everyone knows the premise of 1984 and this book is similar. It is so much more than about books.

It is about censorship and the people wanting it. The government has banned all printed material except for comic books, 3D pornographic magazines, "good old confessions" and trade journals. All other printed material is deemed too offensive to someone. So much in-fighting in society because everyone claiming something offends them. So to make everyone happy, the offensive materials are removed. Because of the year this was written (1953) Ray Bradbury could have not envisioned the internet. If he had, it would have been heavily censored also. In 1953 ideas and knowledge were shared through print as they had been for hundreds of years.

According to the book, the people wanted the offensive materials removed. Because everyone is offended by something then everything is offensive, it must all be destroyed.

For me the novel rings true about how easily people are offended by another person's ideas, thoughts, actions, beliefs. In the story those things are still allowed (they can't control what you think), but without being able to write them down ideas and thoughts die pretty fast.

Ultimately the story is about freedom and not being so judgmental of others lest ye be judged. If you look around today, 11/4/2017, this story has never been more relevant. We have protests and attacks in the streets daily based on ideals and beliefs that clash with others. These clashes occur, rather than people going their separate ways and understanding that the beliefs and ideals of others are just as legitimate as their own. Some groups would rather have a scorched earth policy and destroy everything they hold dear, as long as the other side loses everything as well.

505 people found this helpful

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Anonymous shopper

Numerous text errors in this print edition.

Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2020

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Of all books. I'm disappointed, Simon & Schuster. Of all books.

How am I supposed to read a book about a dystopian future where books are forbidden, deemed a danger to society, summarized, digested, and then silenced, and not trust you to publish an accurate copy of the author's original work?

I found two errors by the time I reached page 53, and only because they are glaringly obvious. Having not read the book before I have no idea how else the work has deviated from the author's source material.

Page 37 - "Master Ridley," said Montag a last.

A last? What is that? "A" should be "at."

This one is particularly egregious:

Page 53 - "School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored."

Gradually gradually? Really, really? There should only be one occurrence of the word.

I am disappointed, at best. It is now upon me to return this book and find an accurate replacement. The onus to find accurate text in published works should not be on the consumer.

71 people found this helpful

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Bubba Militia

Pages missing?

Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2018

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Never read this before and have always wanted to. Got to this point and noticed the page numbers jumped from 18 to 47. Am I just dumb and this is how the book was written, or am I actually missing pages? Any help would be much appreciated.

121 people found this helpful

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Kelly England

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house"

Reviewed in the United States on August 26, 2015

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'It was a pleasure to burn.'

It's such a famous opening line and despite the fact that I'd never read Fahrenheit 451, one I've seemed to know for the longest time. It would crop up every so often in my life, usually at trivia nights. I knew it was a classic book, the type reluctant schoolchildren are assigned to read as part of their curriculum. As a progressive I always felt I was doing it a disservice by not reading it, so I set out to buy it on Amazon and finished it in under a day.

Let's tackle the plot first.

It's set in a Mid-West American city in a dystopian future. Our hero, Guy Montag, is a fireman except firemen in the future don't put out fires, they cause them. Books are forbidden and if any are discovered they are burned, including the house hiding them. Montag has no qualms with this, until one day he's called out to the house of an elderly lady. She chooses to set fire to herself and her house before Montag can do it. Shaken to the core by this, he tries to share it with his wife Mildred, but she's too addicted to vapid and superficial television shows to engage in conversation. Her big concern is getting a fourth TV. The only person he develops a connection to is his teenage neighbour, Clarisse. She's free-spirited and questions him constantly. One day she goes missing. Mildred casually tells him that Clarisse is dead.

Montag starts to wonder if books are really so bad. He steals a book of poetry from a house he's called out to burn. His chief begins to grow suspicious of him and pontificates about the dangers of books and independent thinking. Montag begins to feel rebellious as he rails against the hedonistic nature of society. One night Mildred invites some girlfriends over. Montag rashly brings his book out and recites poetry to them, moving one woman to tears. The others are mortified and Montag finds himself in serious trouble. I'll stop here before spoilers creep in.

I was interested to learn Bradbury's inspiration for this book. Apparently he was once out walking at night with a fellow writer when a police car pulled up and an officer got out. He asked Bradbury what he was doing, to which he responded that he was walking, "Putting one foot in front of the other." The officer was unamused with what he considered a smark aleck response and told him never to do it again. Bradbury was so angry that he went home and wrote a short story about a man who lived in a time when walking was considered a crime. Bradbury was also outraged at the persecution of artists by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the House of un-American Activities.

Many writers far better equipped than myself have wrestled writing a treatise for this book, so I'll leave further analysis to them. I just wanted to say that despite the obvious allegory in the story, I think it works just as a simple tale about the importance of books. Books have always been a big presence in my life. From as far back as I can remember, I have always had a full bookcase, jam-packed with titles in my bedroom. I was a voracious reader, blithely leaving books wherever I finished them (invariably not in said bookcase). I grew complacent and took it for granted that I was free to read whatever I chose. It was only as I grew older that I began learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, about the Nazi book burnings, and about the scorching and burial of texts and hundreds of Confucian scholars in ancient China. It's sobering stuff and made me think. I know of no country that doesn't have an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism. Generally books are considered deep (though plenty aren't), and there will always be those whom openly distrust (to the point of hostility) those deemed 'highfalutin and clever.' It is entirely plausible that at some stage in the future, books will be banned in any given country. If nothing else Fahrenheit 451 should serve as a warning against authoritarianism, and for a call to keep the free flow of knowledge and art alive. When I cast a roving eye on the pile of books next to me, I am full of appreciation and awe. I will protect them from any fire.

169 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

T. Gow

Bradbury's on Fire with Fahrenheit 451

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 4, 2017

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I read the first four or five pages four or five times. Once I got myself into "dystopian" mode, then I was flying. Frankly, this book blew me away. Published in 1953, the future Bradbury imagined has well and truly arrived. I'm not talking about "robo dog" and book burning in a literal sense, but the mind numbing effect of social media, the empty diet of visual pap and meaningless tripe so many of us call "entertainment" So many scenes in this book stand out; slap you hard in the face for being willfully ignorant about important issues; for being politically apathetic. Let's hope that we will be spared the cataclysmic ending Bradbury envisioned. The writing is efficient rather than lyrical, but the intellectual content is astounding. Would recommend.

66 people found this helpful

Boingboing

A flickering ember rather than a raging inferno.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 9, 2018

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Fahrenheit 451 is a book I would probably have said I'd read if you'd asked me. I could probably have told you the basic premise: a dystopian land where books are banned and 'Firemen' don't put out fires any more. I might well have read it and - rather counter to the spirit of the book - then pretty much forgotten it. And that's kind of sad because this book is one that most readers know about, a book that challenges the things we love, and yet it's also not really all that great. I hate to say it but it's a little bit forgettable.

It's a short novel and a quick read and it lights the flicker of a flame of thinking about the power of books but it's all just so rushed, so fast to develop and accelerate, that a lot of the opportunities to explore deeper are missed. Montag the fireman - one of the elite who set fire to books, burn people's houses to punish them for the knowledge in their books - witnesses an old lady start a fire and kill herself because she can't be without her books, and meets a young girl who tells him there's so much more to books then just fuel for his fires. He takes a book and becomes part of the anti-establishment.

In the foreword to the book, Ray Bradbury tells us he spent less than 10 dollars hiring the use of a typewriter to write Fahrenheit 451. Sadly sometimes it shows. This is just the bare bones of a story, lacking the meat to flesh it out into something more satisfying, more horrifying. It was written in the 1950s with the Nazi book burnings still fresh in people's minds but long before the wall-to-wall round the clock interactive television experiences that Bradbury envisions. For its time it must have been revolutionary. Today it just looks a bit tired and much too rushed.

21 people found this helpful

leonie

Book review

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 17, 2018

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This has been on my TBR for a longgg time and it's only a short book so I don't know why I've waited this long!  Title: Fahrenheit 451  Author: Ray Bradbury Publication Date: October 1953 Page Count: 243 Pages Rating: 3.5* Quote: ‘Books are only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what book says. How they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.’ Cover:  Summary  In an unknown year far into the future (or at least from the date this novel was written) Guy Montag is a fireman. Except not the kind of fireman we all know. Instead of putting out fires, firemen in this time start the fires, burning books which are completely banned from society. Guy loves his job and feels that Burning books is exactly the right thing to do, until he meets a young woman name Clarisse who starts to give him ideas about what else there might be in the world, changes his thinking and makes him consider the question 'why?' What this results in is a turn of events for Guy, he begins to doubt his wife's 'parlour family' who live inside the virtual reality walls of his living room. Makes him doubt that books are really bad and that is normal for war to break out and be over in a matter of hours. Why is the world like this? And is there anything Guy can do to change it? Put it right?  Review  The risk with reading dystopia which was written 7 decades ago is that it won't have stood the test of time. This is not the case with Fahrenheit 451. Instead this novel continues to teach valuable lessons; not least the importance of books and reading. But also friendship, relationships and to be honest it's scary how accurate Bradbury was in his predictions of technology and VR taking over real connections and relationships. Thought provoking and in parts terrifying a perfect read for any fan of dystopia. 

7 people found this helpful

Char Louise

More like a short story than a novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 6, 2018

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This short novel was adapted from five short stories by the author, and to be honest, it shows. The characters are not well developed, there are no sub plots and the progression of the story was predictable. The only interesting and likeable character, Clarisse, unexplainably disappears a third of the way into the novel and is never seen again (the author admits in the introduction that he should have given Clarisse a proper ending). As a book lover, I did enjoy the musings on the nature and value of books, and their effects on society both good and bad, but it did still feel like more of a short story or even an essay than a complete novel. Rather than making me think, I felt like the whole book debate and all its arguments were just handed to the reader on a plate. Funnily enough I actually enjoyed the final 20% of the book the most, when it became the story of an outcast running from the law in a post-apocalyptic world; that was the only point at which I felt any tension because the ending was the only part that wasn’t predictable, and I didn’t know whether Guy would be captured or not. I wish the novel had been extended to show what happened after the city is bombed, and how the men slowly re-introduce literacy, because that was the part I felt most intrigued about. I’m glad I read it because it’s a classic, but it’s a strange book and the structure and pacing didn’t work for a novel.

5 people found this helpful

Percy Prune

Burning Creativity

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 10, 2018

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This is another worryingly prescient book written in the middle of the last century. A dystopian nightmare that is becoming all too real.

As is explained in the book, Farenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns. Society has "developed" to the point where people are immersed in a world created by gigantic video screens, tiny radios in their ears and drugs. Books are illegal and must be burned because the ideas inside COULD make some people unhappy. (Sound familiar?)

This is the story of one of the book-burners, (ironically called firemen due to all modern houses being fireproof) who realises the fundamental wrong he's helping to commit, waking up and doing something about it.

The first half of the book is pacy and well constructed, you follow Montag through his growing awareness of the emptiness he's feeling. The second half follows what he does about it.

This was written in the McCarthy era of the 1950's but it stands up extremely well today. Sadly, a lot of the things in the book proved prophetic, fortunately though, not all!

7 people found this helpful

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