Real Men Read: Brave New World

Thursday, November 15, 2018
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

NOTE: This month’s meeting is one week earlier than normal due to the Library being closed on Thanksgiving.

A towering classic of dystopian satire, BRAVE NEW WORLD is a brilliant and terrifying vision of a soulless society—and of one man who discovers the human costs of mindless conformity.

Hundreds of years in the future, the World Controllers have created an ideal civilization. Its members, shaped by genetic engineering and behavioral conditioning, are productive and content in roles they have been assigned at conception. Government-sanctioned drugs and recreational sex ensure that everyone is a happy, unquestioning consumer; messy emotions have been anesthetized and private attachments are considered obscene. Only Bernard Marx is discontented, developing an unnatural desire for solitude and a distaste for compulsory promiscuity. When he brings back a young man from one of the few remaining Savage Reservations, where the old unenlightened ways still continue, he unleashes a dramatic clash of cultures that will force him to consider whether freedom, dignity, and individuality are worth suffering for.

Aldous Huxley’s ingenious fantasy of a future of mechanical efficiency and engineered harmony has been enormously influential for generations, and is as provocative, powerful, and riveting as when it was first published in 1932.

Real Men Read is an open forum book discussion covering nonfiction books and fiction books that appeal to men…and even some women.  Our tradition in Real Men Read is to stick with books that have a colon in the title, even if it’s fiction. All are invited! Discussions are generally on the fourth Thursday of each month unless otherwise noted. To have a book set aside for you, contact Dave Anderson at 859-781-6166.

Cold Spring Branch