Customer Reviews

Are Two Legs Really Better?
Animal Farm? This book looked like an easy way to save time on a book report I had been assigned. It was short, comical, and full of illustrations. Heck, this report might not be so bad after all. Animal Farm took two days to read and several more to ponder the significance of it.I was already aware that Animal Farm was a polotical satire, and I could not help but notice how closely the plot-line resembled th state of Russia while under Stalin's rule. After doing an ample amount of research I discovered that Animal Farm was anti-Stalinist propaganda. The way Orwell portrays how manipulative a person (or a group of people for that matter) can be when kept politically blind is just awesome. Orwell displays keen observation on how a corrupt government sucks all the energy and life of a country. Sure, sure it all starts out looking like every decision made by authority is just and will benifit the people, but, as proven time and time again, there will always be someone at the top whose ambitions become... to self-serving. It's an exellent book, and a person's age would not affect their comprehension of it in a negative way. If I had read Animal Farm in the second grade, it still would have made sense to me. Animals take over a farm, live a happy life, become steeped in hardship, and are eventually betrayed by the the one who they thought would protect them. That is essentially what Animal Farm is about. Definitely a good read, open to interpretation. Read it for the story, the deeper message, the humor, or for whatever reason. Animal Farm will not fail to amuse.

Eno's Review
It was my first time reading Animal Farm. My class just finished reading the novel just a couple weeks ago. The book itself was a perfect representation of almost any type of government, I thought. I was surprised by how many symbols my teacher brought to my eyes like Boxer performing such laborious tasks with out question like loyal pawns, security dogs acting as a sort of military strength, and the pigs being in the place of tyrants which isn't ironic.

Although the book was indeed depressing, and sad, but is was also most interesting. I do admit falling asleep through the book as class carried on, but the book is very detailed, fast paced, full of imagination, and doesn't possess an ounce of vagueness throughout the book.

Through the repressed privileges and lies the pigs almost fit the description of humans, which makes perfect sense on why the pigs were perceived as tyrants.

This book works perfectly to anyone who is interested in the rise of communism in Russia, in which the book revolves around. It also occurred to me that this book also has a moral or lesson to the reader because it made me think it's utterly impossible to give less and expect more.

Chilling
Animal Farm successfully works as a chilling distillation of human behavior gleaned firsthand by George Orwell during the Spanish Civil War. He had become -for a time - one of those useful leftwing idiot intellectuals, like Hemingway and Dos Passos, who thought fighting for the Loyalists against Franco in the Spanish Civil war was the cat's meow. However, it wasn't long before every socialist and anarchist brigade on the Loyalist side was being coordinated, staffed and equipped by Soviet Stalinists who first purged their own, and then became every bit as brutal and inhumane as Franco's Nationalists. At least Orwell and Dos Passos saw the error of their ways.

Where the allegory fails, however, is that Orwell puts the literate pigs at the top of the heap and makes less-than-bright barnyard animals unwitting dupes when we all know that super-schooled egghead types on the left and the right so often fall for utopian mumbo jumbo.

This Book Just Doesn't Age
I read Animal Farm today. I believe it's the first time I've ever read it, although I've been very familiar with the story since I was a little girl.

When I was about four years old, I remember turning the television on to watch Mr. Dressup. A message came up: "Mr. Dressup will not be shown today. In its place, we will be presenting the animated feature, Animal Farm."

"Oh goody!" I thought. "I like cartoons!"

So I sat down and started to watch.

Bear in mind that I was a very hyper child who never watched anything on television except by fly-by. I'd zoom back and forth, playing as hard as I could, occasionally pausing to catch a couple of moments of tv programming. I sat perfectly still in front of the television for the entirety of Animal Farm, and when Boxer, the faithful, hardworking horse was sent off to the glue factory, I raged and screamed and cried and stamped my feet and shook my fists. I screamed, "It's not fair! It's not fair!" over and over again.

Well over three decades later, I still remember watching that cartoon. I remember the sense of helpless rage and horror. I may not have understood the concepts of communism or absolute power doing its absolute corruption, but I was able to recognize when something wasn't right.

I can't say an episode of Mr. Dressup ever effected me similarly.

So I read the book today, and I felt the same sense of righteous indignation with those pigs that I did as a four-year-old. But this time I didn't stomp and scream. I sat quietly and my brain barraged me with parallels, feeling rather like Alex in the forced eye-opening scene from A Clockwork Orange.

There aren't many books which engage me so viscerally.

All Animal Farms are equal...
...but some are more equal than others. This is a simple paperback version of one of two Orwell novels that have become mandatory reading for anyone with a grasp on the English language. I am going out on a limb to instead recommend grabbing the hardcover anniversary edition with illustrations by Ralph Steadman (ISBN: 0151002177) instead, particularly to those who have already read the book once through. Here's why.

A lot of the reviews on here clamor about how Orwell predicted our current political climate astonishingly well, or how accurate his allegory has become in light of the Bush administration. In addition to Steadman's wonderfully grim (and expectedly violent) illustrations throughout, I feel that the anniversary edition is given the additional benefit of an explanation of George Orwell's intentions and motivations from the author himself. The real cause he was pursuing, exposing the evils of Communism (not Britian, Western Civilization, democracies gone awry, capitalism, etc.), is very intresting to me, and I think this epilogue will be insightful to other readers. If you're new to Animal Farm, read the first version you can get your hands on, if you're going back to it again, definitely track down a copy of the 1996 version. I was very glad I did, and not just to have the kick of some slick illustrations, either.

There's no use wasting my breath recommending the story of Animal Farm itself. It should be read, and will conceivably be continued to be read until the end of time. As long as politics and governments fail, and they will, Animal Farm is an essential, keenly observational allegory for our time, for all time. Read it.