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5 Minutes with ???, Or, Is This Where I Turn In My Animal Farm Book Report?

These responses came from an email with the address of bertandernieluvpbj@gmail.com. The email address had a display name of Buzz Capra. No reply when I asked for an HBD username.

1/What If Sports. How long have you been on the site, and how did you end up here? What is your favorite game here? Favorite team or experience on the site? 
          My book report is on Animal Farm, by George Orwell, is a Signet Classic in which animals take over the farm. In the book, animals are used to represent communists and people represent Democrats. I would say that using animals to represent communists was a pretty good idea, because, historically, communists tried to do a lot of animalistic things, like aim nuclear bombs at America, and that is like something an animal on a farm might do.

2/Sports. What are your favorite teams in the real world? Favorite players and/or sports memories? What drives you crazy about sports or sports culture? 
          Portraying communists as animals who try to run things instead of humans is a good way to make a point. The best scene in the book was probably when some of the various animals on the farm set out to create a paradise of progress, ideals, and equality.

3/Music. What are the last three things you listened to? All-time three favorite artists? Best show you've seen? 
          Anyone who knows history knows how that really turned out. Not only George Orwell, the author, deserves credit, but Russell Baker for his excellent introduction. Edmund Wilson from The New Yorker sure knew what he was talking about when he said the book was "Absolutely first-rate... on par with Voltaire and Swift."

4/Aside from sports and music, what are your favorite hobbies, films, books, etc? What might surprise us about your interests?
          All in all, George Orwell did a great job, and Animal Farm is a Signet Classic in every sense of the word, and well worth the $5.99 purchase price. It's so good, in fact, that if I was in Canada, I would be happy to pay the higher price of $7.99.


5/Survival. Where are you from originally, and where are you living now? How do you pay your bills, assuming you do?

          If you liked "Voltaire and Swift," then you will love Animal Farm.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Animal Farm is a political critique that takes the form of allegory, farce, or caricature but suffers from being a gross simplification. The methods of animal allegory and farcical caricature cannot be carried
far, wide, or deep. Yet Orwell‟s intention is highly didactic. The picture given in the story is not only simplified but also over-emphatically one-sided and over-generalised. Orwell, in fact, betrays something like contempt in the very selection of animals as rebels, as politicos, and as the oppositions of Jones, the human ruler of the set of animals who are the oppressed. Jones, though corrupt and failing, is human to begin with. There is no such consolation for the mass of the ruled. Even though Orwell rightly exposes the hypocrisy and corruption of the ruling classes in whatever from they may appear (human and animal) and illustrates well the principle that power per se could be corruptible.

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