• Title: Why I Write
• Author: George Orwell
• Genre/Subject: Political essays
• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication Date: 2004
• Start date: 7/21/24
• Finish date: 7/23/24

Review:

Four essays, the first and namesake one being Why I Write, then The Lion and the Unicorn, A Hanging, and finally Politics and the English Language. All excellent, all way more applicable to the present day than I or anyone should be comfortable with.

The first line from the second essay is as follows: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” The year was 1940 and Orwell, in London, was being blitzed. Personally I would have been busy getting blitzed, but Orwell was made of sterner stuff.

Orwell has been praised as the conscience of the 20th century and these essays confirm the accuracy of that description. I had to stop several times to grab my hi-liter as there were some lines that I had to save for future quoting. For example:

– The rule of money sees to it that we shall be governed largely by the old – that is by people utterly unable to grasp what age they are living in or what enemy they are fighting…a generation of the unteachable is hanging up on us like a necklace of corpses.

– A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more because he drinks.

– Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

And so many more. The truly amazing thing about all these essays is, like Orwell’s novel 1984, how prophetic and accurate they are. Take out the name Hitler and replace it with Trump and any of these essays would fit perfectly on an Op-Ed page in any liberal newspaper. If that doesn’t scare you, it should.

This was excellent. Excellently written, excellently reasoned and excellently argued. I have read lots of Orwell in my life but I realize that many readers have only read Animal Farm or 1984. If that is the case with you, give this a go. At 120 pages it’s a fast read and not bogged down with excessive prose. Orwell gets straight to the point and argues clearly and succinctly. The Penguin series that publishes these little volumes is called Great Ideas, and this is a shining example of that very thing.