Orwell's Ghosts
Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography
Winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
For the 75th anniversary of 1984, Laura Beers explores George Orwell’s still-radical ideas and why they are critical today.
George Orwell dedicated his career to exposing social injustice and political duplicity, urging his readers to face hard truths about Western society and politics. Now, the uncanny parallels between the interwar era and our own—rising inequality, censorship, and challenges to traditional social hierarchies—make his writing even more of the moment. Invocations of Orwell and his classic dystopian novel 1984 have reached new heights, with both sides of the political spectrum embracing the rhetoric of Orwellianism.
In Orwell’s Ghosts, historian Laura Beers considers Orwell’s full body of work—his six novels, three nonfiction works, and brilliant essays on politics, language, and the class system—to examine what “Orwellian” truly means and reveal the misconstrued thinker in all his complexity. She explores how Orwell’s writing on free speech addresses the proliferation of “fake news” and the emergence of cancel culture, highlights his vivid critiques of capitalism and the oppressive nature of the British Empire, and, in contrast, analyzes his failure to understand feminism.
Timely, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking, Orwell’s Ghosts investigates how the writings of a lionized champion of truth and freedom can help us face the crises of modernity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This invigorating study from historian Beers (Red Ellen) investigates what George Orwell's life and writings can teach contemporary readers about modern controversies. Charting the development of Orwell's politics and philosophy, Beers notes that the author had become by his own account "a bit Bolshie" while attending the elite Eton boarding school, and that witnessing Britain's oppressive regime in Burma while enlisted in the Indian Police Service "awakened his social conscience." Evaluating competing ideological claims to Orwell's legacy, Beers argues that Orwell would have regarded skeptically individuals who invoke his name (and his dystopian novel, 1984) to complain about being de-platformed by social media companies for politically contentious views, citing Orwell's belief that his publisher had been within its rights to renege on their agreement to put out Homage to Catalonia in the late 1930s because it feared the report would undermine the anti-Franco cause in Spain. Beers has a knack for finding fresh angles on the much discussed author, highlighting both his overlooked sense of humor and the less savory aspects of his character, including his failure to consider the oppression of women in his writings on inequality and his disrespect for "women's boundaries and bodily autonomy" (he made "repeated unwelcome advances on women" and opposed abortion). This is a valuable exploration of what it actually means to be "Orwellian."
