Product Description
Aldous Huxley's lifelong concern with the dichotomy between passion and reason finds its fullest expression both thematically and formally in his masterpiece Point Counter Point. By presenting a vision of life in which diverse aspects of experience are observed simultaneously, Huxley characterizes the symptoms of "the disease of modern man" in the manner of a composerthemes and characters repeated, altered slightly, and played off one another in a tone that is at once critical and sympathetic.

First published in 1928, Huxley's satiric view of intellectual life in the '20s is populated with characters based on such celebrities of the time as D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Sir Oswald Mosley, Nancy Cunard, and John Middleton Murray, as well as Huxley himself. A major work of the 20th century and a monument of literary modernism, this edition includes an introduction by acclaimed novelist Nicholas Mosley (author of Hopeful Monsters and the son of Sir Oswald Mosley).

Along with Brave New World (written a few years later), Point Counter Point is Huxley's most concentrated attack on the scientific attitude and its effect on modern culture.Amazon.com Review
When it was published in 1928, Point Counter Point no doubt shockedits readers with frank depictions of infidelity, sexuality, and thehighbrow high jinks of Aldous Huxley's arty characters. What's trulyremarkable, however, is how his novel continues to shock today.True, wemay hardly lift an eyebrow at poor Marjorie Carling leaving her husband tolive in sin with--and get pregnant by--her lover Walter Bidlake. And thesexual exploits of Lady Edward Tantamount or her daughter, Lucy, seem quitein keeping with the behavior expected of such exalted persons by readersinured to the exploits of the British Royals. If the varieties of sexualexperience on display in Huxley's novel seem tame by current standards, hisclear-eyed dissection of the motives behind them are thrillingly fresh--andhis commentaries on everything from politics to ecology sometimeschillingly prescient. Take for example, the wisdom of amateur biologistLord Edward Tantamount on the subject of non-renewable resources:

"No doubt," he said, "you think you can make good the loss with phosphaterocks. But what'll you do when the deposits are exhausted?" He pokedEverard in the shirt front. "What then? Only two hundred years and they'llbe finished. You think we're being progressive because we're living on ourcapital Phosphates, coal, petroleum, nitre--squander them all. That's yourpolicy. And meanwhile you go round trying to make our flesh creep with talkabout revolutions."

Huxley fills his novel with a multitude of characters, from the obscenelywealthy Tantamounts to the priapic painter John Bidlake, his childrenWalter and Elinor, and their respective mates, Marjorie Carling and PhilipQuarles. There is also the venomous Maurice Spandrell, the revolutionaryIllidge, the unctuous Burlap, and the happily married (a rarity in thisnovel) Mark and Mary Rampion, who are the book's moral center--theirs isthe one relationship that combines reason and passion in proper measure. They are purportedly in part based on well-known figures of the timesuch as D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. Love, loss, infidelity, andmurder are the subjects under discussion as Huxley juxtaposes one point ofview against its opposite, and mixes in a healthy dollop of science,politics, religion, and art, as well. Point Counter Point is anintelligent novel about the intellectual world, and one that bears upgracefully under the test of time. --Alix Wilber ... Read more

Customer Reviews (31)

Pretty pointless
I didn't like this book.Aldous Huxley has succeeded in creating a book in which every character is distasteful.There is simply not one character in the book who is likable or who has any redeeming qualities.

Many other reviewers seem to suggest that the whole point of the book is to demonstrate the moral decay of English society around the time of the First World War. However, how can one seek to demonstrate moral decay without some point of moral reference?In order to do this, Huxley would need to create at least one character who establishes a moral point of reference by which the other characters in the book can be judged.There is simply no character in the book which fulfills this reference role. As a result, the book is no more than a fairly pointless and gratuitous description of decaying individuals.

I had also expected Huxley to provide some well argued and intellectual insights into his own atheism and his general skepticism about organised religion.Unfortunately, in this regard, Huxley only succeeded in demonstrating his arrogance, stupidity and condescension - for example:

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough."

A further reason for the title of my review, is that virtually nothing of substance happens in the entire book and the only significant events which do occur in the book, appear to occur for no apparent reason and are not explained. I found myself going back a few pages after one of these pointless events to check whether I had missed the explanation of why the event happened - unfortunately, there was no explanation.

Give this book a miss!

Point, not counterpoint
Aldous Huxley's 1928 novel opens with a grand London party given by Lady Edward Tantamount. Music plays. Dozens of characters cross the stage, meet briefly, argue, and part. Some go on to a restaurant that stays open past midnight; there, they meet still more characters and argue some more; several of them continue to yet another party in the early hours of the morning. We are now 100 pages into the book, a quarter of the way through. The numerous characters will continue to bump into each other over the next days and months, but the essential texture of the opening will not change.

If you Google the title, the question comes back "Did you mean Point Counterpoint?" Well, no. Counterpoint is a musical term implying line and movement: two or more voices, intertwining with one another, echoing, developing, but never standing still. Huxley certainly understands that music implies movement -- his descriptions of actual music are superb -- but his method as a novelist is essentially static: to set characters off against one another, each of whom represents a different point of view. The book is thus a series of debates, some funny, some serious, all clever. But the characters ricochet off one another like balls on a pool table; this is truly a matter of point clashing with point; there is no line, little movement, and almost no plot.

Oddly enough, Huxley has one of his characters, a writer, criticize his own method: "Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is the mouthpiece. In so far as theories are rationalizations of sentiments, instincts, dispositions of soul, this is feasible. The chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to express -- which excludes all but about .01 per cent of the human race." And again: "The great defect of the novel of ideas is that it's a made-up affair. Necessarily; for people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren't quite real; they're slightly monstrous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run." He has it right; this book IS a made-up affair, it IS tiresome, and its .01 percent of the human race consists of a handful of English aristocrats and intellectuals -- Huxley as a kind of egghead Evelyn Waugh.

Several times, I almost tossed the book away, yet kept on reading -- why? The first time was when Huxley introduces Mark Rampion, a painter and would-be novelist closely based on his friend D. H. Lawrence. Here is a character who does not come from the upper classes, whose thoughts are three-dimensional and fully worked out, and whose unconventional yet bracing morality serves as a touchstone for the other characters in the book. The chapter describing his courtship is one of the few passages where the novel of ideas becomes one of feeling, and it was riveting. Although nothing quite like that chapter comes again, I kept on because I was often amused, sometimes challenged (Huxley is an erudite author who almost demands footnotes), and increasingly aware that I was reading something that was as close to source material on the period as I was likely to find. For Huxley does not confine himself to the social and amorous goings-on typical of an early Waugh book such as A HANDFUL OF DUST. He also addresses politics (both fascism and communism are represented), religion and its substitutes, philosophy, the arts, and science. Even sex gets analyzed with an almost scientific detachment: there is a long disquisition by one of the more despicable characters on the techniques of seduction, perversion, and spiritual degradation; another embarks on what must be the first examination in literature of the phrase "sleeping around". As a reference work, this is fascinating; I just wish it were a better novel. Interesting though the numerous points are, I could have done with some genuine counterpoint.

Where's the Story?
This book is fascinating, and Huxley's genius is evident on every page.However, his effort to create a giant contrapuntal mosaic of different voices fails in that it has almost no driving motion to propel it forward.In music, that motion is created by the beat.In writing, it is created by the story.
While this book can be appreciated for its deep insight into human nature and exquisitely drawn characters, it remains more of a static work such as that of a photo or painting, and requires the reader to move through it, rather than moving the reader along.In a shorter book, this might work.In a work of this size, it leaves the vast majority of readers unsatisfied or abandoning the book.There is a reason why this book has so few reviews. It is not the fault of some readers that that Point Counter Point is not as popular or accessible as some of his other novels.It's because he has only appealed to the intellect capable of looking within a painting for an hour, and not the intellect who can listen attentively to an entire Mahler Symphony.To the musical intellect, this book teases with its occasional brief advances in action, then jerkingly stops the microscope repeatedly to focus on the characters.Huxley is unable in this book, like a true master, to keep the microscope moving.

This is fantastic.
Like all of Huxley's other books, this one requires that you have some intellect before embarking on reading it.Once you finish it you will feel as though you have done more than just read a novel, but rather you will have a better understanding of the human psyche, this being a product of the novel's rich characterizations and dialog.

Literature ....
Every time I write a review of a book which is considered "literature" I am afraid that some Pulitzer Prize winner dude with 2 PhDs is going to track me down and hit me over the head with his cane, but, since I move once a year, I will take my chances. I wish the rest of the book tasted like the first 20 pages. It starts with a series of insights of the minds of the characters which is just exquisite, but then it dilutes onto other things, which are much, much more mundane and I just do not see the same quality of thought put into the writing until some chapters ahead.

My 2 cents. ... Read more

Product Description

When the novel Brave New World first appeared in 1932, its shocking analysis of a scientific dictatorship seemed a projection into the remote future. Here, in one of the most important and fascinating books of his career, Aldous Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy. He scrutinizes threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion, and explains why we have found it virtually impossible to avoid them. Brave New World Revisited is a trenchant plea that humankind should educate itself for freedom before it is too late.

Customer Reviews (37)

NEVER SURRENDER TO THE NEW WORLD ORDER
IN AN AGE WHERE MAN HAS CONTINUOUSLY BEEN DECEIVED IT SHOULD BE NO SURPRISE THAT THIS BOOK OVER 50 YRS REMOVED SHOULD TELL OF WHAT IS STILL HAPPENING TODAY, AND THAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE MAN WAS ABLE TO COMPREHEND EVIL! SADLY THE TRUTHS WITHIN TELL OF UNIVERSAL CONTROL AND MANIPULATION FOR THE MASSES, THAT FEW COULD BE SO REMOVED FROM MORALITY AND VALUES SO AS TO BE DESTROYERS OF THAT WHICH IS GOOD AND WHOLESOME. KNOW THIS FLESH AND BLOOD THAT DESIRES THE HEAPINGS OF THE WORLD, YOUR TIME IS SHORT LIVED IN THE SCOPE OF THE KING OF KINGS AND THE LORD OF LORDS. BLOOD CRIES OUT FOR JUSTICE AND IT WILL BE SERVED IN A FULL COURSE MEAL OF HELL ON THAT DAY!. THEKINGOFANATION@[...] HAS SPOKEN.

Eye-opening
Brave New World Revisited is a non-fictional essay by the same author as the fictional negative-Utopian novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley.

This book was written almost 30 years after Huxley's landmark title Brave New World. Here Huxley compares the ideas in Brave New World with what was then modern day (1959). Huxley discusses brainwashing, propaganda, over-population, hypnopaedia (sleep-learning) and other subjects that were the driving force behind his original work. What's scary is how much truth is really behind this work and it's even more relevant now than it was in 1959!

This is a very short book that reads almost like an extended after-word for the original Brave New World. Though for me it wasn't as moving as the original work, I still found it very eye-opening. If you haven't read the original work then you can still read this just fine, but still, read the original if you haven't done so!

Huxley's Dystopia nearly eighty years later
This book which is a modern classic was first published in 1931. Its importance and fame are in its ideas, and not in its value as literary creation. Its character are more abstractions than real people and it is difficult to have deep feeling towards them.
The book's power is in foreseeing that future scientific and technical developments will enable fundamental changes in human society and even nature. He depicts a test-tube baby - world which is divided into classes, and which stresses Security and Community while totally suppressing individual character and freedom. Huxley sees that Happiness when made into a single exclusive Good can be made the Enemy of the Good.
There is no doubt that Huxley had foresight all out of the ordinary. But he did not have 'prophecy' and certainly did not foresee the way the scientific developments have actually taken place. The world we live in is much more complicated and has many more new challenges that the simple totalitarian model presented by Huxley. While his great fear was assembly- line uniformity the truth is we more face a kind of anarchic Internet individualism. While he saw a world which would be totally ordered and secure we have a world in which nuclear weapons are in danger of proliferating and Terrorism with a religious base is increasing.
What struck me on reading this book is that how Huxley even in the biological areas in which he justifiably focused could not get it right. We do have test- tube babies today but they are not produced in batches and made uniform. Huxley's world is one in which parenting was outlawed but now it seems that one future threat is that parents will be in fierce competition with each other over how to ' best design' their children.
Again our world seems far far more complex and more challenging on many levels than the one Huxley envisaged for us here.

REQUIRED READING
This is an exquisitely articulated and bracing book of twelve essays on over-population, over-organization, brainwashing and propaganda in both democratic and totalitarian societies, and chemistry for so-called better living.

First published over 50 years ago, everything essential in the book is a complete state-of-the-art assessment of society and politics.

On page 134, in the last chapter entitled "What Can Be Done?", Aldous Huxley writes, leaving nothing more to be said (after reading):

UNDER THE RELENTLESS THRUST OF ACCELERATING OVER-POPULATION
AND INCREASING OVER-ORGANIZATION, AND BY MEANS OF EVER MORE
EFFECTIVE METHODS OF MIND-MANIPULATION, THE DEMOCRACIES WILL
CHANGE THEIR NATURE; THE QUAINT OLD FORMS -- ELECTIONS,
PARLIAMENTS, SUPREME COURTS AND ALL THE REST -- WILL REMAIN.
THE UNDERLYING SUBSTANCE WILL BE A NEW KIND OF NON-VIOLENT
TOTALITARIANISM.... MEANWHILE THE RULING OLIGARCHY AND ITS
HIGHLY TRAINED ELITE OF SOLDIERS, POLICEMEN, THOUGHT-
MANUFACTURERS AND MIND-MANIPULATORS WILL QUIETLY RUN THE SHOW
AS THEY SEE FIT.

What Aldous Huxley writes above is happening right now and has been happening.(See the Copenhagen Treaty, for example.)

Mr. Huxley writes to the end that he highlights the values of liberty and individualism but shows how these human rights scarily are dimming like candles being blown out by the winds of corporatism, collectivism, and ignorance through massive entertainment distraction and advertisements.

This is a very quick read and needs to be read by every single mind-body in the Western world.

Wrong Book
I thought I was getting the book "Brave New World." Instead I got something else. The book was delivered to me in good time. It's in okay condition. ... Read more

Product Description
Aldous Huxley has been called the 20th century's answer to the Renaissance thinker. He gained fame from his utopian and dystopian fiction, including Brave New World, Point Counter Point, Crome Yellow, and Ape and Essence. Learn more about Huxley through the work of respected critics included in this text.

This title, Aldous Huxley, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Views series, examines the major works of Aldous Huxley through full-length critical essays by expert literary critics. In addition, this title features a short biography on Aldous Huxley, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. ... Read more

Product Description
Sebastian Barnack, a handsome English schoolboy, goes to Italy for the summer, and there his real education begins. His teachers are two quite different men: Bruno Rontini, the saintly bookseller, who teaches him about things spiritual; and Uncle Eustace, who introduces him to life's profane pleasures.

The novel that Aldous Huxley himself thought was his most successful at "fusing idea with story," Time Must Have a Stop is part of Huxley's lifelong attempt to explore the dilemmas of twentieth-century man and to create characters who, though ill-equipped to solve the dilemmas, all go stumbling on in their painfully serious comedies (in this novel we have the dead atheist who returns in a seance to reveal what he has learned after death but is stuck with a second-rate medium who garbles his messages). Time Must Have a Stop is one of Huxley's finest achievements. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

An important and pleasurable read
It is sometimes forgotten that the author of Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited, The Perennial Philosophy and Doors of Perception continued writing fiction long after Brave New World. Huxley believed this was one of his best novels and I believe he was right. The book is arresting from the beginning when a young lad with a poetic temperament finds himself locked in a struggle between a callous Socialist father, for whom politics is everything and yet refuses to so much as get his son the dinner jacket that he needs so badly, and another more spiritual man who guides and reminds the boy that man does not live by politics alone.

Huxley was a fascinating character and man of many contradictions. Having just about finished Nicholas Murray's biographyof him, I was almost amused to see how Huxley, while rejecting the miracles of Jesus Christ on allegedly empirical grounds, was nevertheless not only an connoisseur of psychadelic drugs, but also a frequenter of seances, Fourth Dimensions, and all sorts of other occult phenomena right up until his LSD-tripped-out death in 1963. Huxley was also a eugenicist, a friend and admirer of the devil worshiper Alister Crowley (also known as both Frater Perdurabo and The Great Beast, who called his 'Black Mysticism' Diabolatry and Diabolismin his book Magic in Theory in Practice). Huxley also took to 'Dianetics' founder L. Ron Hubbard of "Church of Scientology" fame and many (and I mean many!) other sordid or faddish types.

All of this seemed in stark contrast not only to reason (ghosts, yes! Resurrection, no!) but (by all accounts) this shy and certainly cerebral and very genteel man of letters (some very brilliant novels and essays; the author Thomas Mann, however, did once observe that the more eclectically "religious" Huxley became, the more Sado-Masochistic sex and gore of various kinds appeared in some of his books!)

Still, despite his contradictions, a quest for spiritual fulfillment of sorts remained an integral part of his life, at least of a more eclectic kind where, tending to monism,he overlooked the many contradictions in various religious systems,instead to focus on the original charism of various "enlightened" ones, as he saw it, though these also often contradicted one another. Huxley however was not about to pursue the problems to resolution and chose to prefer a vague mysticism over discursive thought and the law of contradiction. He seemed to prefer the search to any possession of the Promised Land.

In his novels, this one included, Huxley worked out these tensions within himself along very interesting lines. It is a must read even after all these years. (I think old Aldous would not have liked the Kindle reader at all. There is nothing like a real honest to goodness book where there are few concerns for privacy and tracking and where libraries are heaven itself)

A novel of ideas
As pointed out in the lively preface, this is a novel of ideas, a novel of manners, a critique of human history and a voyage into the realm of the unknown. Because it attempts so much, it's not perfect. But when it's good, it dazzles.

The hero is 17-year-old Sebastian Barack who looks like a Della Robbia angel and writes mythological poetry. His mother died young and his father is utterly absorbed in idealistic political causes. The father's refusal to buy Sebastian decent evening clothes for a party leads the young man into one moral dilemma after another.

Another central character is Sebastian's rich, self-indulgent, affable and effete Uncle Eustace, whose conversation is a fountain of wit. The chapters where Eustace appears are pure reading pleasure. And when he dies, his experiences as a disembodied spirit in the void are equally engaging. This tour de force has been compared to the descriptions of the afterlife in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Sebastian's other important influence is a saintly bookseller who helps him approach "the divine Ground of all being."

Written during World War II and published in 1944, the book is a fascinating window into English society in the `20s.

Spiritualism, a great enthusiasm of the period, also figures in Huxley's narrative. For some interesting background on the short-lived Society for Psychical Research, I'd suggest reading Ghost Hunters by Deborah Blum. It helped me appreciate the séance scene in Time Must Have a Stop.

Time Must Have a Stop by a psychologist
Time Must Have a Stop (the title is from a quote from Shakespeare's Hotspur) is a pleasant read from Huxley's early period, where he was still writing comedy of manner novels about the English aristocracy. The story is of a young poet named Sebastion (destined to take the world's arrows like St. Sebastion) who must deal with a stingy father, and is motherless. He has a taste of luxury and kindness when visiting his somewhat hedonistic Uncle Eustace, but unfortunately his uncle dies in the bathroom of a heart attack after one too many heavy meals. Anyway, not only is Sebastion grieved, but he also makes themistake of trying to sell a recent gift of his Uncle, a Degas, in order to buy some evening clothes for a party. The painting is found missing by an estate auditor and Sebastion must get it back. He appeals to a saintly but odd relative, who retrieves it. The plot winds on, the relative becomes ill because of his efforts to help Sebastion (do not want to give away too much here), and Sebastion becomes chastened as he comforts the man. The book is funny and innovative in that it describes a seance where, comically, an intermediary idiot spirit ruins all of the dead Uncle Eustace's funny little witticisms from beyond. From a psychological point of view, this is one of the better descriptions of Avoidant Personality Disorder (Sebastion). Indeed, Huxley's novels are suffused with this style of personality. Evidently, it was a style of personality either common in Huxley's circles, or perhaps a feature of Huxley himself.Nowhere better than in Huxley's novels do we find description of this personality type described half a century later by eminent psychologist TheodoreMillon, as the Avoidant Personality or the "active detached" pesonality. Damon LaBarbera, Ph.D.

The Spiritual Vision of a Great Genius
One thing that critics and fans alike agree on is that all of Huxley's later work has as its focus the kind of mystical, moral, personal transformation that goes back to the ancient Greeks.Huxley was convinced that love and goodness are the answer to life, and that self-knowledge and moral commitment to love are the only things that make life meaningful and the only hope for humanity.Many modern critics, being postmodern nihilists, hate this line of thinking and have been known to express this in no uncertain terms.

For those people who are convinced that love, goodness, and God (the transpersonal Eastern, Buddhist mystical God as opposed to the personal God of Western fundamentalists) are the answer to life's questions, Huxley's later works are an unequaled treasure.They are ten times as intelligent, subtle, and thought-provoking as the work of virtually any "New Age" author, and ten times as enjoyable as thouroughly realized works of art.

The characters are drawn with Huxley's characteristic satirical sensibility.The vision of the afterlife is a very original and unique aspect of this particular work.There are a few flaws in this particular work in that the poetry is rather bad and the epilogue, though by far the most inspiring part of the book, does seem to be somewhat "pasted on" to the end of the book, instead of worked in seamlessly to the storyline.

For those willing to allow themselves to be inspired by visions of goodness or saintliness, as people have been inspired by the accounts of Jesus, the Buddha, and many others throughout history, the best aspect of the novel by far is the depiction of Bruno Rotini.There may not be such a description in existence that was ever written with a better sense of aesthetic brilliance.

Aldous Huxley - The Great Explainer
At the centre of this book is a marvellous attempt to describe what happens to the 'soul' after a human dies. Huxleys ideas for the novel are based on the Bardo Thodol (better known in the West as The Tibetan Book of The Dead). While you follow the dead person through various bardo states Huxley stays very much rooted in what we perceive as the everyday world, his characters dialogues entertaining us with customary Huxley wisdom and wit on everything from politics to art and literature. Another wonderful voyage with one of the pioneer synthesizers of East and West. ... Read more

Product Description
In this savage novel Huxley transports us to Los Angeles in the year 2018, where we learn to our dismay about the 22nd-century way of life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (29)

Aldous, you genius... You truly magnificent genius.
This novel is a must read for anyone who has the slightest interest in Aldous Huxley... The other reviews / reviewers say much more, and explain in greater detail, but believe me, read this book... Make it the "New" bible...

Interesting, but not terribly substantial
According to an online source, Huxley aimed in his writing to produce a perfect fusion of novel and essay. He intended his books to be filled with interesting opinions and striking ideas. In 'Ape and Essence' these goals can be clearly discerned, but their development is somewhat on the sketchy side. To begin, the book is actually a novella, which took around 6 or 7 hours to read, and I don't think I'm a terribly fast reader.

That is not to say that ideas of considerable import can't be conveyed in a story of that length, but if they are going to have much depth of development, they must be pretty focused. Focus is the ingredient which was sacrificed in this book, to try and achieve the goal of a fusion between essay and fiction.

There are two very disparate sections of the book. First, there is the introductory chapter, 'Tallis', where two Hollywood screenwriters stumble onto a mysterious script by an unknown writer. Their interest is whetted and they try to track him down, only to find he had died weeks before. This short portion ostensibly revolves around the relationship between the two screenwriters. The unnamed narrator plays passive analyst as his partner, Bob, rambles on about his financial and marital difficulties. The narrator gives us, the readers, an ongoing sly, ironic and entertaining commentary which he doesn't share with Bob.

The narrator, who is obviously Huxley's spokesman, is a supremely sophisticated and intellectual screenwriter. He weaves into his observations on Bob's predicaments many philosophical and literary references. In these few pages, in the midst of the narrator's commonplace conversations, he is mentally racking up thoughts and reflections on: Gandhi, Christ, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Beddoes, Martin Luther, Rembrandt, Breughel, Piero, Plato, the Parthenon, the 'Timaeus', the "Republic', Marxists, Fascists, Churriguera, Catherine of Siena, Goya, Lady Hamilton, Ninon de Lenclos, and la petite Morphil. If you weren't familiar with all those people, don't feel bad. I made ample use of internet sources to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

After finishing the book, if you return to this introductory section you will realize that the ruminations of the narrator laid the groundwork for the larger story which is contained in the abandoned script. Bob epitomizes the vapid, self-absorbed, materialistic modern world as contrasted with selfless martyrs and saints such as Gandhi, Christ, and Catherine of Siena. The world usually finds it necessary to kill such people, because they interfere with the "order" of the state. The restless striving of the Romantics is a willful ignoring of the simple and nourishing spiritual solutions of the saints. The ivory-tower speculations of philosophers in quest of their proprietary versions of the 'truth' have led to the inglorious tyrannies based on Marxism and Fascism. In particular, this desire of each group to be right has led to the irrationality of wars based on nationalism and ideology. Besides the philosophical themes, Bob's troubles with women foreshadows the sexual adjustments visited on humanity in the script-story.

The second section 'The Script' shows us the results of mankind's willful stupidity. But before we get into the story proper, there is a short sequence of a few pages where we are given an allegorical picture of the events which led up to the main drama. Baboons, with scientists such as Einstein and Faraday as slaves, are busily developing and perfecting ever more potent weapons of mass-destruction. It doesn't take a genius to figure out who the baboons are, and what the likely result of their tinkering will be. But sandwiched in between the first, realistic part of the novella, and the projected world of the future where humans are again humans, although in some cases mutated, it seems disruptive to have this isolated fragment of animals as people.

The remainder of the book, which is by far the largest portion, delves into the way humans have adapted to the destruction of civilization, and endeavors to continue that fusion of fiction and essay. Philosophical and theological ideas are the animating forces behind the events which transpire. To give the story human interest, there is the struggle of a post-apocalyptic man and woman to make a humanly acceptable life for themselves despite the recurring irrational tyranny of those in control.

It is a bizarre world of the future which Huxley imagined, with a new religion devoted to Belial, or Satan. The normal relation of the sexes has been disrupted both by mutation and imposition of the authorities. The weirdness of this future society might have attracted a cult following for the book if the highly cultured essayistic element weren't so blatant.

After reading the book, I can say that it stirred up thoughts that the human race may be on the wrong path, but as the story itself suggests, there seems to be little to be done except try to pursue your individual happiness to the best of your ability. The ideas of the book were too general and spread much too thinly to broaden our understanding in significant ways.

As makes the angels weep
Huxley's Ape and Essence so perfectly mirrors proud man's assured ignorance it makes me laugh until I weep.

On Ape and Essence
Ape and Essence is a brief, bizarre, and ludicrously overwritten work of dystopian fiction. The book follows the discovery and full recital of a mysterious play; a play which was almost certainly written by Huxley while under the influence of a particularly foul hallucinogenic substance. Serious fans of Huxley and the dystopian sub-genre of science fiction may find the book worth pursuing, but I cannot honestly say that I would recommend it to any man, woman or child...

Bleak, baby, bleak
Compared to Ape and Essence, Huxley's more celebrated dystopian comic fantasy, Brave New World, bursts with sunny optimism about the future.World War II, which intervened between the two books, unquestionably accelerated Huxley's depair. In Brave New World, the people of the far future had lost their edge, their creativity, their sense of the tragic; that seemed like a sorry enough fate to readers in the pre-Nazi, pre-Hiroshima 1930s. But Ape and Essence posits a crueller and more desperate post-apocalyptic future.

Huxley delivers the bad news in his trademark style, a savage yet mannered irony that must have inspired Terry Southern a generation later. Most of the story is told in the form of a manifestly unsellable film script by an imaginary unknown.The script's narrator sets the scene by briefly describing World War III in chilling detail: if you're not afraid of thermonuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, just read the few pages that Huxley devotes to them.Your current mundane nightmares will take a serious turn for the worse.

The script does end on an upbeat note.But it's in a '40s movie.Huxley himself gives absolutely no cause for optimism. Nearly sixty years ago he specified fanatic nationalism and contempt for the natural world as the most dangerous attitudes on earth.

Now look around you.

Still scary after all these years, Ape and Essence is for those who like their dystopias blackly humorous and seriously thought-provoking.


... Read more

Product Description
In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, he took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the folds in his grey flannel trousers, was transformed. "Red books like rubies, emerald books, books of agate and aquamarien. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence." Huxley described his new "sacramental vision of reality" and the liberating potential of hallucinogenic drugs in his 1954 essay, "The Doors of Perception" and its 1956 sequel, "Heaven and Hell". These writings were crucial to the brave new dawn of the psychedelic 1960s. ... Read more

Product Description
These first two volumes of a projected six collect the complete essays of one of the major writers of the 20th century. His reading was immense, his taste impeccable, and his ear acute....His place in English literature is unique and is certainly assured. --T. S. Eliot. Edited with Commentary by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. ... Read more

Product Description
London life just after World War I, devoid of values and moving headlong into chaos at breakneck speed Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, like Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, portrays a world of lost souls madly pursuing both pleasure and meaning. Fake artists, third-rate poets, pompous critics, pseudo-scientists, con-men, bewildered romantics, cock-eyed futurists all inhabit this world spinning out of control, as wildly comic as it is disturbingly accurate. In a style that ranges from the lyrical to the absurd, and with characters whose identities shift and change as often as their names and appearances, Huxley has here invented a novel that bristles with life and energy, what the New York Times called "a delirium of sense enjoyment!" ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

rather good
criticisms of this book as being plotless or "a novel of ideas" make little sense to me. so far as i know great art is often unconventional, and i personally found this to be a very intelligent and entertaining meditation on society and human nature wrapped in precise, beautiful prose. sharp observations and a sadly humorous sense of absurdity permeate each page as huxley examines various facets of the human condition through his characters thoughts, pretensions, and actions. the book never reaches any conclusions about it's subject matter and is structured as a loosely interconnected series of vignettes, but there's nothing wrong with either unless you have very narrow ideas about what a book should be. enjoyed it immensely.

Huxley - well below his best
One senses that Huxley was aiming for a little mordant social satire when he wrote this book, to capture the Zeitgeist while landing a few deft jabs at British society in the aftermath of World War I. But "Antic Hay" is a clunky, sorry mess, whose primary virtue is its brevity. Heavyhanded and confused, it never gels to anything even remotely memorable.

It's not too hard to figure out why. There is no discernible plot - instead, various stock characters are dragged in and out of the action, essentially caroming off one another in a fairly random fashion. You've got your artist, your poet, your critic, your (pseudo)-scientist, your futurist, your lowlife, your romantic, a vamp, and a flapper or two, and the (anti)hero Gumbril, who is spectacularly devoid of personality. None of these characters is fleshed out in any credible way - they just engage in brittly clever dialog (which is to say, lethally boring dialog), mouthpieces for whatever point of view they are supposed to be representing. While the reader is left baffled as to what the hell Huxley might be trying to convey.

I think the answer is that Huxley doesn't really have anything much coherent to say, in this dull and annoying book. Since there's no plot to speak of, eventually it just sort of peters out.

This book provides another example of a writer who disappointsby a complete abrogation of the author's responsibility to tell the reader a story. You'll get fresher insights on this particular milieu by reading a couple of Agatha Christie's mysteries, and I dare say you'll have more fun doing so as well.

NOT SO ANTIC
OK, so Huxley thought he could write humor. "Thought" is as far as he got. The three star rating is because he can write, but I did think of not finishing this. There were some funny parts and some interesting parts but they were outweighed by the ho-hum parts.

Do not make this the first Huxley you read!!!

Satirical Wit might be too much for some
I have to say I enjoyed this novel, as I have almost all of Huxley's other writings, for the light it shines on a particular segment of society in an interesting if confused time.Huxley employ's his characteristic wit and satirical prose in telling the tale of a mixed group of Londoners in the 1920's, all seeking to make sense of a life, and perhaps more importantly to derive pleasure from it, that has lost it's focus somewhere along the way.The protagonists range from pedants, academics, failed artists, journalists, scientists, and the idle rich and the just plain idle.Their interactions with one another form the loose framework of the story, although it seems really to be about each person's individual pursuit of their own particular pleasure.I say it seems to be about this because it is hard to put your finger on a single theme.

Some will have trouble with this novel as it lacks a serious plot device or any culmination of the story in a climax.It certainly does not fall into the same category as some of Huxley's more famous fictional works such as Brave New World or Island.Those who care to give it a chance though may be delighted by what they do find, namely a snapshot into the life and society of the pseudo-aristocratic circle in the inter war period in Britain.The time was one of change in society; a break from the past was clearly in the midst of happening, but no one was sure where is was leading, if anywhere.In this sense the novel and the characters really capture the essence of the time with their apparent frivolity and absence of direction.It is still a very readable novel, although at some points it is clear that the amount time that has passed since its publication in the 1920's has left become too large a gap to overcome.Although Huxley is a greater writer and many of his works have stood the test of time, Antic Hay is not one of them.

Still the novel is packed full of humorous moments, for example Theodore's giddy glee at the prospect of joining the ranks of the capitalist with his bound-to-be-fantastic new invention: pneumatic trousers, and does good job capturing the spirit of the age, however confused that spirit may be.Huxley's command of the English language, as well as French and Latin, and his overall intelligence offer rewards to the reader outside the story itself.For those who appreciate a master performing his craft, Antic Hay will be a delight.

I had to put it down.
I usually get drawn into Huxley's books, but this one is his first--and thankfully only--attempt at comedy.It is dreadfully unfunny and unstimulating, a contrast most of the rest of his body of work.One thing I noticed was that half of the dialogue ended with exclamation points, and that is way too much!Thus, I don't recommend that you read this book! ... Read more

Product Description
In this dazzling conjunction of subject and author, the great English novelist Aldous Huxley is brought wholly alive in a magnificent full-scale biography by the brilliant English novelist Sybille Bedford. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

It's a slog
This is my latest read of Sybille Bedford's works and, I might add, I'm a huge fan of hers. In some ways this is a masterful effort on Sybille's part, the cradle to grave biographical tome, yet it will take a very dedicated reader to plow through this one without putting it aside. As the Sybille Bedford reader will attest, if you are not at least somewhat fluent beyond English (i.e. French, a bit of Spanish, Italian) she can be a somewhat distracting as she intersperses her paragraphs in foreign tongues. Of course, Sybille knew the Huxleys well for many years and can certainly paint the portrait. However, as she mentions, quite a bit of Aldous's own letters have been lost and she relies extensively on Maria's (his wife) lengthy letters to family and friends; to say she was a prolific letter writer is an understatement. Anyhow, I do believe this was a gallant effort to capture the life and times of Aldous Huxley and most probably Sybille Bedford was the best author to do so. At 700+ pages, just make the commitment!

sympathy and objectivity make a fine book
I read this superb biography years ago, as part of a Summer's "free reading" (a luxury for an academic), for I had no particular interest in Huxley, having read only his "Chrome Yellow" and "Point Counter Point" at that time.Bedford, I discovered, is a glorious writer (she has written probably the best book in English on Mexico) and possesses rare insight into the minds of other artists.These gifts make her biography of Huxley a masterpiece.As you follow her narrative, you will be impelled, I predict, to read the Huxley novels you have thus far ignored.

Deftly probes Huxley's life and writings
Syville Bedford's literary biography Aldous Huxley blends Huxley's remarkable life with his quite successful literary career, all wrapped in the familiarity of the author with Huxley's family over the decades. With such associations in hand, biographer and author Syville Bedford then deftly probes Huxley's life and writings, creating a memorable biography and a set of insights that deserves ongoing mention. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Selected writings from the author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception on the role of psychedelics in society.

Includes letters and lectures by Huxley never published elsewhere.

In May 1953 Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescaline. The mystical and transcendent experience that followed set him off on an exploration that was to produce a revolutionary body of work about the inner reaches of the human mind. Huxley was decades ahead of his time in his anticipation of the dangers modern culture was creating through explosive population increase, headlong technological advance, and militant nationalism, and he saw psychedelics as the greatest means at our disposal to "remind adults that the real world is very different from the misshapen universe they have created for themselves by means of their culture-conditioned prejudices." Much of Huxley's writings following his 1953 mescaline experiment can be seen as his attempt to reveal the power of these substances to awaken a sense of the sacred in people living in a technological society hostile to mystical revelations.

Moksha, a Sanskrit word meaning "liberation," is a collection of the prophetic and visionary writings of Aldous Huxley. It includes selections from his acclaimed novels Brave New World and Island, both of which envision societies centered around the use of psychedelics as stabilizing forces, as well as pieces from The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, his famous works on consciousness expansion. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Good Service
The book was in the condition that the seller stated it was in. The price was right and it arrived in a timely manor. This is all that mattered to me.

Good collection of Huxley's writings
Do not be fooled by the table of contents.Even though it says the book contains "The Doors of Perception" and "Heaven and Hell," it in fact only contains a few brief pages of abridgement.That warning to the buyer aside, the book does contain an interesting array of letters regarding the same experience recounted in "Doors of Perception" and many other trips that Huxley took.Particularly useful are the historical introductions to the letters collected in this volume.It allows the casual reader to know what events are being discussed in the letter.

A great visionary
Moksha is a word in Sanskrit which means "liberation", and liberation is probably the best word to describe Aldous Huxley and his writings. Liberation from external forces, from norms and views of reality that the authority figures of the West have told you are "real" and "true", liberation from everything that stops you from finding your own path in life and the creation of your own truth.

In the world of fiction, Huxley is perhaps best known for his novel Brave New World, in which he painted a rather gloomy picture of a not-too distant future where the people are controlled by the use of Soma, a synthetic drug enabling everyone some time-out from their own miserable existence. This theme was continued in the later book Island, where the name of the drug has been changed to Moksha and is seen as a positive thing, a way for the individual to find his or her own means of evolution instead of a cheap escape from the dreaded reality. However, Huxley was more than just a writer of fiction, and in Moksha the reader is treated to a glimpse of this man's amazing intellect. Besides some of the many letters he wrote during his lifetime, you'll also find excerpts from different lectures held all over the world, interviews, and important sections from some of this best fictional writing, such as Brave New World, The Doors of Perception, Island, and Heaven and Hell.

The larger bulk of the text is about psychedelic drugs and their beneficial use in different sorts of therapy as well as their ability to help mankind in the expansion of human consciousness, and it's quite a pleasure to experience Huxley's fascinating ideas about these types of drugs, especially since they in later years came to be treated as a total menace to society. Even in these alleged times research on their beneficial use is still considered a crime more or less everywhere, which actually is nothing but bizarre since they've been proven to be very useful when administered correctly by professionals. But not everything in the books deals with this, because Huxley had tons of interesting views and things to say about such topics as art, literature, religion, psychology, and ecology.

From time to time it's a very demanding book, but if you just take your time and explore the often complicated thoughts and ideas, then Moksha will give you not only a good insight in the mystery that is human perception of reality, but also a splendid presentation of one of the most progressive thinkers in modern times.

Highly Educational
New Age, Self Help, Cults. While you might think that some of these things are 'new'.
you can find through this book that the human condition appears to have established
itself quite a long time ago and has not changed a great deal in aggregate over time.

It is really unfortunate that so little is understood about the workings of the human
mind and that so little of our collective time is spent in pursuit of a deeper cognition.

Well worth the investment in both time and money for anyone interested in knowing
more about themselves.

Drop Acid, Not Bombs
If you like Huxley, especially his writings on psychedelics and the visionary experience, then obtain this book. It can be redundant at times, but it gives you a personal look at Huxley's interest in self-trancendance and the potential helpfulness of "psychodelics" through letters written to friends, lectures, and other mystical treats. If you've never read Huxley's opinions on psychedelics than I suggest you read Doors of Perception first just to tread the surface of what Huxley envisioned ... Read more

Product Description
A description of a futuristic, controlled community with utopian overtones, Brave New World illustrates the results of failing to establish control over science. In this eerie, provocative novel, the characters are completely subdued and enslaved by a small ruling group that wields the power of science.

This concise supplement to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World helps students understand the overall structure of the novel, actions and motivations of the characters, and the social and cultural perspectives of the author. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An insightful commentary on Huxley's "Brave New World"
If you are teaching Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel "Brave New World" in class, as I am with my Utopian Images: Fact & Fiction course, then the main thing you want to know about this CliffsNotes on that particular book is that the two critical essays that appear in the back of this volume deal with "Society and the Individual in 'Brave New World'" and "'Brave New World Revisited': Further Thoughts on the Future."So as long as you avoid or proscribe these topics in terms of any sort of major writing assignment associated with "Brave New World," you do not have to worry about students abusing this little black and yellow-stripped book.

The tag team of Charles Higgins and Regina Higgins begin with a section devoted to the Life and Background of the Author, that covers Huxley's early years, education, jobs, literary writing, and honors and awards.This sets up "Brave New World" as the work that changed Huxley from a satirist into a social philosopher.The Introduction to the Novel section introduces readers to the historical background of the novel, which gives an indication of the real world circumstances that Huxley was responding ot, as well as a brief summary of the field of utopian fiction, the way the structure of the novel defied the conventions of such fiction, and a brief synopsis of "Brave New World."There is also a list of a dozen characters, getting down to the level of Pope and Mitsmima, as well as one of those Character Maps with which the CliffsNotes folks are so enamored.

The Critical Commentary section goes chapter by chapter, providing a summary along with a section of commentary that denotes paragraphs devoted to (a) themes, (b) style & language, (c) character insight, and (d) literary devices.The look at each chapter ends with a glossary of difficult words and phrases, as well as allusions and historical references, which is extremely helpful.This is followed by a section providing Character Analyses of Bernard Marx, John the Savage, Lenina, Linda, The D.H.C., Mustapha Mond, and Helmholtz Watson.Then there are the two aforementioned Critical Essays, the CliffsNotes Reviewand the CliffsNotes Resource Center, which provides books, Internet sources, and films and other recordings dealing with Huxley and his novel.There is even an index, with is a nice addition (something they did not have when I was a mere lad).

As always, my view is that the best way of using this CliffsNotes volume is to go directly to the Critical Commentaries section after you read each chapter.Use the summary to reinforce your undersanding of what happened in the chapter along with the commentaries.If you are reading the novel you might look at the glossary for each chapter as you are doing the actual reading (which, of course, you know you should be doing), but that is really the only thing you want to look at ahead of time.The other sections of this book will be much more useful to you once you have read the book. ... Read more

Product Description
In this accessible new biography, Dana Sawyer explores Huxley's life and the impact it had on his writings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Short and Largely Uncritical Biography
Workmanlike prose in a short biography that borders on hagiography. A reasonable introduction to Huxley's thought, but if you're looking for a fuller, more critical analysis, consider Nicholas Murray's biography of Huxley.

Excellent Read
I enjoyed the book. When I read it, I felt that the author was a close friend of Huxley's.If any reader plans on reading any books by Huxley, please read this informative, well-written biography first.

~
Laura Huxley herself said to Sawyer [paraphrased], "Out of all the biographies written about Aldous, this is the only one he would have actually liked." With emphasis on philosophical studies and works, it is the definitive source for understanding Huxley's influence and ideas. Being a student myself at Maine College of Art, I can vouch for the know-how of Sawyer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

El inevitable futuro de nuestro mundo!!
"Un Mundo Feliz" es una obra maestra, pues relata la historia de un mundo en el cual la humanidad a perdido su individualismo y habilidad para pensar. A base de drogas el gobierno mantiene a la poblacion alejada de analizar su pobre vida, un acto similar al que el mundo se encuentra en estos dias, con las drogas del televisor, radio y otros medios...

Predicting the future.
There's been a lot of talk recently about the decipherment of the human genome and it possible use.With the knowledge obtained by the genome project humanity is allowed to alter the course of its evolution or atleast change many aspects of its development.Huxley presents a worldwhere humans are able to make other humans.Presents a sexually liberatedworld.He presents a world with several classes of humans...

Hepresents one of the possibilities of a world that could be obtained withthe knowledge we have now.This is a very good book if you want to broadenyour view about genetic manipulation and the human Genome Project.Mustread! ... Read more