Book Review: Brave New World Revisited

(Bought at the Strand for $10) I saw this on one of the tables at the Strand and grabbed it. Written 25 years after his dystopian novel Brave New World, Huxley considers how close we've come to his predictions of a drug-addled populace controlled by the government. Using essays rather than fiction, Huxley compares the techniques of Hitler in brainwashing his followers to those employed in his novel and Orwell's 1984. At the time of the writing, the Soviet Union was domineering their sphere of influence with torture and terror, closely following Big Brother's playbook. Huxley forecasted bread and circuses would do the trick more subtly and effectively. I fear he was right. So many of his dire forecasts sound like strategies of our "dear leader" Trumpy. The author details the effects of Hitler's rallies hypnotizing his loving throng and Trump is taking a page from Der Furher's book--perhaps literally. Trump's rallies resemble those of Nuremberg in their chanting simplistic slogans and stirring up resentments. Huxley makes the point that democratic norms only hold in place when economic stability hold sway. He points to overpopulation as a means of destabilizing society and leading to autocracy. When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, overpopulation was a BIG issue, but nobody talks about it anymore. Climate change is now the biggest threat to our continued freedom and it may be just as bad as overpopulation. Already extreme weather is disrupting life around the globe. Democratic states are being toppled by populist thugs in Europe and America. Hopefully, enough freedom-loving people will recognize their rights are being chipped away and will turn the tide before it's too late.

Book Review: Some Time in the Sun: The Hollywood Years of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathaniel West, Aldous Huxley, and James Agee

(Bought at a used-book store in upstate NY for 50 cents.) Tom Dardis' scholarly study of five distinguished authors who tried their hand at screenwriting during Hollywood's Golden Age is informative if a trifle dry. There's little juice in his chronicling of the quintet's struggles with studio bosses, directors, and, in some cases, alcoholism and depression. It's a scholarly book and also a study of the conflict between art and commerce. All of the authors, to one degree or another, were dependent on their movie money for survival. It's somewhat astonishing to read that literary giants like Fitzgerald and Faulkner had to scramble for cinema dollars in order to pay their bills because the sales of their books, now regarded as classics, were so meager. Though Dardis offers plentiful details such as salary figures and specific studio assignments, he misses the essence of his subjects. I didn't feel I knew any of them any better once I'd finished the book.