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Summary
Summary
'Fahrenheit 451' ist die Temperatur, bei der "Bücherpapier Feuer fängt und verbrennt". In Ray Bradburys Zukunftsvision ist die Feuerwehr nicht mehr mit Wasserspritzen ausgerüstet, sondern mit Flammenwerfern, die genau diesen Hitzegrad erzeugen, um die letzten Zeugnisse individualistischen Denkens - die Bücher - zu vernichten. Da -beginnt der Feuerwehrmann Guy Montag, sich Fragen zu stellen... Die beängstigende Geschichte von einer Welt, in der das Bücherlesen mit Gefängnis und Tod bestraft wird, ist ein zeitloses Plädoyer für das freie Denken.
Summary
For use in schools and libraries only. A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners suddenly realizes their merit.
Author Notes
Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois on August 22, 1920. At the age of fifteen, he started submitting short stories to national magazines. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 600 stories, poems, essays, plays, films, television plays, radio, music, and comic books. His books include The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Bradbury Speaks. He won numerous awards for his works including a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1977, the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation.
He wrote the screen play for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted 65 of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. The film The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit was written by Ray Bradbury and was based on his story The Magic White Suit.
He was the idea consultant and wrote the basic scenario for the United States pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair, as well as being an imagineer for Walt Disney Enterprises, where he designed the Spaceship Earth exhibition at Walt Disney World's Epcot Center. He died after a long illness on June 5, 2012 at the age of 91.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Spanish Language Review
"Fahrenheit 451 es el más convincente de todos los infiernos conformistas."
Publisher's Weekly Review
After years of working as a fireman-one who burns books and enjoys his work-Guy Montag meets a young girl who makes him question his profession and the values of the society in which he lives. Stephan Hoye's narration is perfectly matched to the subject matter: his tone is low and ominous, and his cadence shifts with the prose to ratchet up tension and suspense. He produces spot-on voices, and his versions of the gruff Captain Beatty, the playful Clarisse, and the fearful professor Faber are especially impressive. A Ballantine paperback. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
School Library Journal Review
In this foremost example of dystopian fiction, Bradbury twists the heroic role of firefighters. In a futuristic society, firemen don't put out fires, they start them. Specifically, they burn books and the subversive ideas contained within their pages. The trouble begins when one fireman, Guy Montag, begins to question the system and seeks to escape the control of the city. Hoye is a superb guide through this terrifying world, moving both action and reflection along with exactly the right pacing. First published in 1953, the story remains disturbingly contemporary and the ending, with its determination to keep books alive by memorizing them and speaking them aloud, is well suited to the audio medium. The 1996 film, directed by Francois Truffaut and starring Julie Christie and Oskar Werner, veers from the original story, making it particularly useful as a student exploration of the differences between Hoye's interpretation of Bradbury's words and Truffaut's greater liberties with the text. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Library Journal Review
This quality hardcover of the Bradbury standard is being released to honor the book's 50th anniversary. With numerous book clubs adopting this title, it's worth buying a few hardbacks to go along with your existing paper editions. This reprint also includes a new introduction by the author. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning. Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame. He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man, burnt-corked, in the mirror. Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered. He hung up his black beetle-colored helmet and shined it; he hung his flameproof jacket neatly; he showered luxuriously, and then, whistling, hands in pockets, walked across the upper floor of the fire station and fell down the hole. At the last moment, when disaster seemed positive, he pulled his hands from his pockets and broke his fall by grasping the golden pole. He slid to a squeaking halt, the heels one inch from the concrete floor downstairs. He walked out of the fire station and along the midnight street toward the subway where the silent air-propelled train slid soundlessly down its lubricated flue in the earth and let him out with a great puff of warm air onto the cream-tiled escalator rising to the suburb. Whistling, he let the escalator waft him into the still night air. He walked toward the corner, thinking little at all about nothing in particular. Before he reached the corner, however, he slowed as if a wind had sprung up from nowhere, as if someone had called his name. The last few nights he had had the most uncertain feelings about the sidewalk just around the corner here, moving in the starlight toward his house. He had felt that a moment prior to his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person's standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There was no understanding it. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak. But now tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. His inner mind, reaching out to turn the corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing? Or was the atmosphere compressed merely by someone standing very quietly there, waiting? He turned the corner. The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered. He almost thought he heard the motion of her hands as she walked, and the infinitely small sound now, the white stir of her face turning when she discovered she was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the pavement waiting. The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain. The girl stopped and looked as if she might pull back in surprise, but instead stood regarding Montag with eyes so dark and shining and alive that he felt he had said something quite wonderful. But he knew his mouth had only moved to say hello, and then when she seemed hypnotized by the salamander on his arm and the phoenix disc on his chest, he spoke again. "Of course," he said, "you're our new neighbor, aren't you?" "And you must be"--she raised her eyes from his professional symbols "--the fireman." Her voice trailed off. "How oddly you say that." "I'd--I'd have known it with my eyes shut," she said, slowly. "What--the smell of kerosene? My wife always complains," he laughed. "You never wash it off completely." "No, you don't," she said, in awe. He felt she was walking in a circle about him, turning him end for end, shaking him quietly, and emptying his pockets, without once moving herself. "Kerosene," he said, because the silence had lengthened, "is nothing but perfume to me." "Does it seem like that, really?" "Of course. Why not?" She gave herself time to think of it. "I don't know." She turned to face the sidewalk going toward their homes. "Do you mind if I walk back with you? I'm Clarisse McClellan." "Clarisse. Guy Montag. Come along. What are you doing out so late wandering around? How old are you?" They walked in the warm-cool blowing night on the silvered pavement and there was the faintest breath of fresh apricots and strawberries in the air, and he looked around and realized this was quite impossible, so late in the year. There was only the girl walking with him now, her face bright as snow in the moonlight, and he knew she was working his questions around, seeking the best answers she could possibly give. "Well," she said, "I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane. Isn't this a nice time of night to walk? I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise." They walked on again in silence and finally she said, thoughtfully, "You know, I'm not afraid of you at all." He was surprised. "Why should you be?" "So many people are. Afraid of firemen, I mean. But you're just a man, after all . . ." He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity but--what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle. One time, as a child, in a power failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and grew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon . . . And then Clarisse McClellan said: "Do you mind if I ask? How long've you worked at being a fireman?" "Since I was twenty, ten years ago." "Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" He laughed. "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course." "It's fine work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan." They walked still farther and the girl said, "Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?" "No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it." "Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames." He laughed. She glanced quickly over. "Why are you laughing?" "I don't know." He started to laugh again and stopped. "Why?" "You laugh when I haven't been funny and you answer right off. You never stop to think what I've asked you." He stopped walking. "You are an odd one," he said, looking at her. "Haven't you any respect?" "I don't mean to be insulting. It's just I love to watch people too much, I guess." "Well, doesn't this mean anything to you?" He tapped the numerals 451 stitched on his char-colored sleeve. "Yes," she whispered. She increased her pace. "Have you ever watched the jet cars racing on the boulevards down that way?" "You're changing the subject!" "I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly," she said. "If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur! That's a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny, and sad, too?" "You think too many things," said Montag, uneasily. "I rarely watch the 'parlor walls' or go to races or Fun Parks. So I've lots of time for crazy thoughts, I guess. Have you seen the two hundred-foot-long billboards in the country beyond town? Did you know that once billboards were only twenty feet long? But cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the advertising out so it would last." "I didn't know that!" Montag laughed abruptly. "Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning." He suddenly couldn't remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable. "And if you look"--she nodded at the sky--"there's a man in the moon." He hadn't looked for a long time. They walked the rest of the way in silence, hers thoughtful, his a kind of clenching and uncomfortable silence in which he shot her accusing glances. When they reached her house all its lights were blazing. "What's going on?" Montag had rarely seen that many house lights. "Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking. It's like being a pedestrian, only rarer. My uncle was arrested another time--did I tell you?--for being a pedestrian. Oh, we're most peculiar." "But what do you talk about?" She laughed at this. "Good night!" She started up her walk. Then she seemed to remember something and came back to look at him with wonder and curiosity. "Are you happy?" she said. "Am I what?" he cried. But she was gone--running in the moonlight. Her front door shut gently. "Happy! Of all the nonsense." He stopped laughing. He put his hand into the glove hole of his front door and let it know his touch. The front door slid open. Of course I'm happy. What does she think? I'm not? he asked the quiet rooms. He stood looking up at the ventilator grille in the hall and suddenly remembered that something lay hidden behind the grille, something that seemed to peer down at him now. He moved his eyes quickly away. What a strange meeting on a strange night. He remembered nothing like it save one afternoon a year ago when he had met an old man in the park and they had talked . . . Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl's face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it had to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun. "What?" asked Montag of the other self, the subconscious idiot that ran babbling at times, quite independent of will, habit, and conscience. He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who refracted your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought? What incredible power of identification the girl had; she was like the eager watcher of a marionette show, anticipating each flicker of an eyelid, each gesture of his hand, each flick of a finger, the moment before it began. How long had they walked together? Three minutes? Five? Yet how large that time seemed now. How immense a figure she was on the stage before him; what a shadow she threw on the wall with her slender body! He felt that if his eye itched, she might blink. And if the muscles of his jaws stretched imperceptibly, she would yawn long before he would. Why, he thought, now that I think of it, she almost seemed to be waiting for me there, in the street, so damned late at night . . . He opened the bedroom door. It was like coming into the cold marbled room of a mausoleum after the moon has set. Complete darkness, not a hint of the silver world outside, the windows tightly shut, the chamber a tomb world where no sound from the great city could penetrate. The room was not empty. He listened. The little mosquito-delicate dancing hum in the Excerpted from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.