Animal Farm

Animal Farm is an amazing book written by George Orwell in 1945. It was the eighth of nine books published by the author, and it was one of his most popular books with Nineteen eighty four. The book has inspired two movies with the same title, the first of them was made in 1954 and it was a cartoon version. Then in 1999 there was another adaptation, but in this case the film was a live action version. Unfortunately, I haven't seen them yet so I can't say anything about these movies.

The plot tells about a farm in England where the animals become the owners by driving away the human beings. The main goal of this master piece was to criticize Stalin's communism which is named "Animalism" in the book. The author uses different kinds of animals to represent the different kinds of people that were involved in this period of Russian history, for example Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin are represented by pigs named Old Major, Snowball and Napoleon respectively.

As in "Nineteen eighty four" the author showed how the government could change some small things (books, laws, etc.) in order to create the idea that it is always right or that some events never happened. This is the strongest aspect of the two books because the message is very clear, whoever controls the information controls also the memory and the will of the masses. As we go through the pages we can discover that the same points could be criticized to any political system, because in the end the author criticized the deviation from the ideal systems due to human greed.

A sentence that really shocked me and in my opinion summarises the idea of the author is: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Advice: "You should read this terrific book, since reading this masterpiece is an exciting way of understanding why something that in theory seems to be perfect, in practice is a complete mess. It also makes us think of which dark thing could be behind a new law or a government announcement."

Lea's qualification: 9/10