Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
1 Rating(s)
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Down and Out in Paris and London

Author: George Orwell

Narrator: Frederick Davidson

Unabridged: 6 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/14/2009

Categories: Fiction, Classic

Synopsis

Orwells own experiences inspire this semiautobiographical novel about a man living in Paris in the early 1930s without a penny. The narrators poverty brings him into contact with strange incidents and characters, which he manages to chronicle with great sensitivity and graphic power. The latter half of the book takes the English narrator to his home city, London, where the world of poverty is different in externals only.A socialist who believed that the lower classes were the wellspring of world reform, Orwell actually went to live among them in England and on the continent. His novel draws on his experiences of this world, from the bottom of the echelon in the kitchens of posh French restaurants to the free lodging houses, tramps, and street people of London. In the tales of both cities, we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and society.

About George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism. He is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Orwell's work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian - descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices - has entered the language together with many of his neologisms, including Big Brother, Thought Police, newspeak, doublethink, and thoughtcrime.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Bill

As anyone who has read 1984 can attest, Orwell is--among other things--a master of disgust, a writer who can describe a squalid apartment building, an aging painted whore or a drunken old man with just the right details to make the reader's nose twitch with displeasure, his stomach rise into the thr......more

Goodreads review by Jeffrey

“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.” In 1927 Eric Arthur Blair A.K.A. George......more

Goodreads review by karen

this book isn't going to cause anyone to have the huge revelation that "poverty is hard!" or anything, because - duh - but it also doesn't piss me off the way morgan spurlock pisses me off, because orwell makes his story come alive and there is so much local color, so many individual life stories in......more

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