Amazon.com Top 100 Books of the Millenium
Alex is a 15 year old hooligan in a nightmarish England of the future.
He and his droogs (fellow delinquents) roam the streets at night performing
acts of untraviolence and the old in-out, then retire to milk bars and
listen to classical music. Eventually Alex is captured by the authorities
and undergoes Ludovico's Technique, a form of brainwashing that makes him
ill when he considers violence.
The most original feature of this book is, of course, the language that
Burgess created for his characters. It's sort of a bastardized Slavic
slang. It makes it hard to orient yourself at first, but most of
the vocabulary can be gleaned from context.
What makes the book great, is it's recognition of the central dilemma
of man's existence--"Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness?
Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who
has good imposed upon him?" Burgess concludes, as I think one
must, that it is better to have the choice of good or evil, than to have
a society which controls its citizens so completely that "good behavior"
is imposed from without.
(Reviewed:01-Nov-99)
Grade: (A)
Websites:
Book-related and General Links:
-FEATURED
AUTHOR: NY Times Book Review
-REVIEW
: Review of the new edition of Ulysses, by James Joyce, with an introduction
by Richard Ellmann (Anthony Burgess, June 19, 1986, The Guardian)
-REVIEW
: of Foucault's Pendulum (Anthony Burgess, NY Times Book Review)
-The
Anthony Burgess Center (Bibliothèque universitaire d'Angers)
-Anthony
Burgess Society
A
Clockwork Orange
Anthony
Burgess (1917-1993)
Stanley
Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange
-Literary
Research Guide: Anthony Burgess (1917 - 1993)
-ESSAY:
Anthony Burgess as Fictional Character in Theroux and Byatt (John J.
Stinson, SUNY Fredonia)
FILM:
-INFO: A Clockwork Orange (1971) (IMDB)
-REVIEW ARCHIVES: A Clockwork Orange (1971) (MRQE.com)
If you liked
A Clockwork Orange, try:
Chambers, Whittaker
-Witness
Clavell, James
-The
Children's Story
The
Federalist Papers : Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
Friedman, Milton
-Capitalism
and Freedom
-Free
to Choose
Goldwater, Barry
-The
Conscience of a Conservative
Hayek, Friedrich
-The
Road to Serfdom
Hobbes, Thomas
-Leviathan
Howard, Phillip K.
-The
Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America
Huxley, Aldous
-Brave
New World
Johnson, Paul
-Modern
Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties
Koestler, Arthur
-Darkness
at Noon
Locke, John
-Treatises
on Government
Min, Anchee
-Red
Azalea
Orwell, George
-1984
-Animal
Farm
Pipes, Richard
-The
Russian Revolution
Popper, Karl
-An
Introduction to the Thought of Karl Popper (one
of Orrin's Top Ten Non-fiction / Conservative Thought)
-The
Open Society and It's Enemies
Rand, Ayn
-The
Fountainhead
-Atlas
Shrugged
Smith, Adam
-The
Wealth of Nations (one
of Orrin's Top Ten Non-fiction / Conservative Thought)
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr
-The
Gulag Archipelago1918-1956 : An Experiment in Literary Investigation
de Tocqueville, Alex
-Democracy
in America
Comments:
Orrin welcomes reader comments on his reviews.
Add yours here.
