Product Description
Of the ten thousand letters that Aldous Huxley wrote, only a fraction have been published. Almost forty years after the first appearance of a volume of Huxley's letters, those that were once considered too sensitive for publication can now be included in a wholly new collection. James Sexton's thoughtful selection opens new perspectives on the personal and intellectual lives of one of the giants of modern English prose and of social commentary in our time. Some of the earliest Huxley letters movingly depict his courageous battle with almost total blindness and his resulting unfitness for service in the Great War. Later letters to his patroness, Lady Ottoline Morrell, demonstrate much of the brilliance that would soon gain Huxley an international reputation as one of his generation's major satirists. Perhaps the most important group of letters in this edition is the sparkling correspondence from Huxley to Bloomsbury hostess Mary Hutchinson, revealing Aldous as a witty yet ardent lover. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A powerful gathering of his personal and intellectual life
Any college-level collection strong in Huxley literature needs SELECTED LETTERS: it's a powerful gathering of his personal and intellectual life in letters - most of them published for the first time - and is especially notable in light of the fact that of some ten thousand letters he wrote, only a fraction have previously been published - and that this volume comes nearly forty years after the first appearance of another volume of letters. These here have never been published, providing a fine new collection for any college-level library already strong in Huxley works, who would round out their offerings with nonfiction.
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Customer Reviews (2)

Beware of progress
Cherish your emotions. Discontent and sadness can be healthy and welcomed. Moderation in all things is wise.

God does not change. But people do.
We are treated to a glimpse of a possible future world where friendship can still exist.This is a story of a hand full of individuals in a world that emphasizes "Community, Identity, Stability" that find each other and discus subjects that most of the people of that time cold not understand. However we do. Naturally the author Aldous Huxley builds his own scenarios and draws his own conclusions through the characters speeches and description of experimental history.

Bernard Marx who is about to lose his job because he is different (vary different) form those around him, decides to take a vacation to visit the Zuni's. There he meets a misplaced person named John. Together with the help of Bernard's friend Henry they intend to change the world. So they find out the world is incapable of changing.

We get an Ayn Rand type speech from Mustapha Mond one of the world controllers' that helps you realize that in this brave new world the three friends are the anomaly. How can this enigma be solved?

Do not forget to watch the 1998 movie version with Leonard Nimoy as Mustapha Mond.

Brave New World Starring: Peter Gallagher, Leonard Nimoy
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Product Description
Veteran actor Michael York gives voice to Aldous Huxley’sfamous tale of three citizens of a future world who gradually awakento its true nature — bleak, homogenized, and drugged-out — andare determined to escape its control. The remarkably timely themes ofcloning, individual creativity, and freedom, and the role of science,technology, and drugs in our future are the subject of this great workfirst published 70 years ago. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Fascinating and Read (Performed) Well
A fascinating look at a Utopian society.Michael York does an incredible job "performing" this classic story.He uses a different voice and intonation for each character, making it easier to follow Huxley's sometimes confusing leaps from one character or conversation to another.I didn't want it to end.

Brave New World
It was just the way the seller described.Received on time without an issue

A Classic but not much payoff
A Classic but not much payoff...

It's worth a listen or a read.It's unfortunately a little dry and not quite as exciting as some of it's peers.

Brave New World CD
My son is in High School.This is a required reading book for honors English. He suffers from Dyslexia so he is allowed to listen to the books.Having classics like Brave New World available on CD help him to be able to complete assignments.This CD is read by Michael York.Having the familiar voice of an actor we know makes the listening easier. The story is brought to life.

Brave New Performance
This is certainly one of most characterful and dramatic readings in my experience of having heard over 200 audio books. BRAVO to Michael York! I wish more actors of such talent would record more important literature unabridged. Don't miss this phenomenal performance of a great novel! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

hollywood mythology
Tom Dardis' "Some Time In The Sun" surprisingly takes on some myths about the fate of some great writers who wound up in hollywood. Dardis makes it clear that he is a proponent of film as an art, and suggests that the movies influenced in some ways the writers who are considered. The myth is one of a lurid money obsessed hollywood being the bottom of the barrel, and its contribution to the destruction of the literary artists who got entangled with it. Dardis demonstrates that the writers in question were motivated by money, that is important, given that most of the time covered was during the Great Depression. The book considers realistically the writers' need to make a living and the movie industry which could pay them for writing. Filled with fascinating detail, Fitzgerald's attempt to produce a great screenplay (he never did), Faulkner's relation to Howard Hawkes, and West's toiling in the skuzzy part of Hollywood, saving his best for "Day of The Locust." The value of this book, I think, is to overturn the literary mythology that condemns the Hollywood film and the film industry, not uncritically or unrealistically, quite the contrary, but to throw light on the relation of these literary artists to that industry. ... Read more

Product Description
This sixth and concluding volume of Huxley's essays brings to completion what critics have applauded as "a remarkable publishing event". ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
Combining logical argument with literary imagination, Peter Kreeft uses a dialog between C. S. Lewis, John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley to investigate the claims of Christ. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Between Heaven and Hell review
It took over a month to get here. I received it after the last possible receive date. I do not appreciate that.

Extremely Creative and Vivid
I enjoyed this book very much. Peter Kreeft is a brilliant creative writer that captures the essence of all three men in Between Heaven and Hell. Those three men being:

C.S. Lewis - A Professor of Mid Evil and Renaissance Literature at Oxford and Cambridge University. He wrote more than thirty books in his life, most of them having to do with (or symbolically related to) Divine philosophy and theology. Most popular among them are The Chronicles of Narnia Movie Tie-in Box Set Prince Caspian (rack), Mere Christianity,The Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, and The Great Divorce

John Fitzgerald Kennedy - American President and renowned war hero. Saved America from the Cuban Missile Crises, and set into motion what has become modern day NASA. He was a very smart man who graduated Cum Laude from Harvard University. However his degree was in international affairs, and at its heart his thesis/book Why England Slept was a deep look into international affairs as well. Kennedy therefore was not a philosopher, and so doesn't get a lot to say in this book, which is mainly on divine philosophy.

Aldous Huxley- Was a renowned British Universal Writer/Philosopher. He spent most of his life writing novels, short stories, and film scripts. His book mostly having to do with the relations of "Between Heaven and Hell" is The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West (P.S.) He is also very famous for his philosophy of taking psychedelic drugs to connect with the divine. Huxley was a sort of Hunter S. Thompson of his generation.

What do these three have in common? They all died on November the 22nd 1963. This book is a speculation of these three men meeting in the afterlife, and discussing various religious philosophies.

The towering argument in this book is on the Deity of Jesus Christ. Was He God, or man, or both, or not at all?

Overall a very enjoyable, thought provoking book that in my opinion really captures the characters of these men, and the things that they would have/might have said on the divine had this situation really come about. Reading this book I felt as though I was propelled back to C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorceas these two books have enormous similarities on the subject of afterlife speculation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Lively, Fresh and Relevant to Today's Traveler
Aldous Huxley is best known for Brave New World.In Along the Road he exhibits a very lively and lightly satirical style in sketching two types of travelers; then he goes on to offer a wonderful series of essays on packing, suitable travel books and their qualities, a few places in Italy and the Netherlands, notes on viewing major pictures in museums and a final section on travler's diversions such as music and the theater.While Huxley completed this work in 1925 it remains fresh and relevant to today's "savvy" traveler as the Rick Steves' books, including "Mona Winks."His comprehensive essay on Siena'a Pallio horse race is the most complete treatment I have seen on the acutal event.

Each chapter of Huxley's book is in keeping with his dicta that the best books to take on a trip are those that can be read in bits that are independent of each other, those that offer a variety of subject matter and those that do not require close examination or deep thought.Huxley points out that when he traveled with books not fitting this paradigm they did not get read but they did have to be carted from place to place.

I first ordered this book through interlibrary loan but I found so much of lasting interest in its pages (we travel in Italy, Belgium and "Holland") that I promptly ordered a copy to keep for rereading and for future reference! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Musings of a free-thinker
First published in 1956, this is a collection of 17 essays which Aldous Huxley wrote between 1952 and 1956.Although a few of the essays are somewhat dated, in general the essays are insightful, fresh, fascinating, a bit shocking and even outlandish (the final essay in which Huxley advocates a form of free love where the male never climaxes squarely falls in the last two categories).

Huxley was such an out-of-the-box thinker that I sometimes suspect that he must have felt like a changeling, smuggled into the wrong culture, in the wrong century, on the wrong planet. A few of the essays are so esoteric, I had trouble grasping what Huxley was trying to say.Take, for example, this pair of sentences from 'The Education of an Amphibian': "Every human being is an amphibian -- or, to be more accurate, every human being is five or six amphibians rolled into one.Simultaneously or alternately, we inhabit many different and even incommensurable universes."When I first read those two sentences, I jumped to the conclusion that Huxley was in an altered state of consciousness when he wrote them.After finishing the essay, I revised my conclusion.Huxley was trying to put in words experiences that were beyond language. No wonder it sounded strange.

Huxley was also a master of the anecdote.In 'Hyperion to a Satyr' an essay about the essential dirtiness of mankind, Huxley tells of a stroll with Thomas Mann down a Los Angeles beach.The two literati were so oblivious to their surroundings that their more alert wives had to stop them and point out that they were walking through a sea of prophylactics and other human waste that had washed in with the tide from a nearby sewage dump."Malthusian flotsam and unspeakable jetsam", Huxley called it.He had a way with words.

And, Huxley was a seeker.Three of the essays in this book concern separatist utopian communes (both religious and secular).These essays are fascinating and appear to be well-researched.While Huxley praises the idealism of these communities, Huxley is well aware of the irony that all of the utopias failed or died out within a generation or two.

Huxley was an exceedingly good essayist.All of the essays in this collection are good, but none of them rise to the level of excellence that I've seen in other Huxley anthologies. In comparison to some other Huxley essay collections, this one is worth only 3 stars.For a truly five-star essay collection by Huxley, try the one titled, Huxley and God, which contains 28 of Huxley's religious essays. ... Read more

Product Description
The earliest works of Aldous Huxley with an active table of contents.

Works include:
Crome Yellow
Mortal Coil ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The Moral Act of Thinking Correctly
There were times while reading Aldous Huxley's 'Collected Essays' that I was tempted to put it down.Several of the essays, originally published between 1923 and 1956, were outlandishly dated, and all of them were dense and complex - as an essayist, Huxley demands my full attention.Conversely, many of the selections were also entertaining and educative, but what kept me reading were the cogent observations on human nature sprinkled throughout the text.To whit: In an Orwellian number entitled 'Words and Behavior', Huxley ends his discussion on the use and misuse of words by politicians with the following gem -

"To think correctly is the condition of behaving well.It is also in itself a moral act; those who would think correctly must resist considerable temptations."

In this context, 'behaving well' meant behaving as a decent human being, not reflexively obeying a State's orthodoxy.Huxley is not talking to the rulers, but the ruled.When those in power use symbols and abstractions to solidify their base of support, the majority of the ruled may find it easy to then "gratify instincts which the conventions of good manners and the imperatives of morality demands that they should repress."This comes from an essay published in 1937, and it seems obvious that Huxley was looking mostly at the fascist states in Europe at the time - though I believe that his admonishment is just as valid today.Abstractions and symbols are still popular, and dogmatic belief in their value lends itself to mob mentality - hence the imperative to 'think correctly'.

This sampling of Huxley's essays may have represented his best work when it was published in 1959, but those essays forecasting future concerns (and awakening our perception through pharmacology) no longer have any grounding in reality, and they detract from those that elicit nuanced perspective.As a springboard for my own thoughts, many of Huxley's insights are still relevant, though because of their uneven nature, this edition and Huxley's complete essays in four volumes are probably not the most effective means of transmitting those ideas.I think in this new century, the past still has something to teach me, and the reading public who may be interested would be well served with a new, slimmed down collection, culling the most pertinent, instructive and entertaining of Huxley's thoughts for our time.To my mind, such a collection would be especially valuable, since many of the abstractions and symbols used today are lifted directly from the reality with which his generation had to contend.To read the observations of a discerning mind from the time in question is a great gift - that that mind was not hyperbolic nor hysterical is also great pleasure.

The essays of an extraordinarily cultured intelligence
There are times when I start to review a certain book, such as this one, and am somehow disappointed to see that no one else has ever reviewed it for 'Amazon'. This is especially so when it is a book like this one, that has so much in it, so many brilliant perceptions and thoughts.
Aldous Huxley was not simply the author of 'Brave New World ' one of the visionary ' novels' of the century , he was also a superb essayist. In this collection he writes with intelligence and verve about Literature, Politics, Nature, Travel, Love, Sex and Beauty,Painting, Music, History, Psychology, Way of Life.
In the opening essay' Wordsworth in the Tropics' he somewhat cantankerously works to disabuseus of the idyllic Wordsworthian picture of 'nature' He presents apicture of the horrors of non-hospitable nature, and ties Wordsworth 's genius to a particular latitudinal range. In the Tropics Huxley suggests there would not have been those 'intimations of immortality.
Huxley in other context wonders about the meaning of life while in Jaipur contemplating the joy at which the natives collect elephant dung. The thought of Newton and Shakespeare and mankind's mission troubles him for a moment, until he compares the dung- collecters to the dung- makers, and concludes that human beings' nonetheless have something to be proud of when we compare ourselves to our animal cousins.
In one of his most famous essays he speaks about the 'opening of the doors of perception' which comes with the taking of mescaline or psychedelic drugs. He comes then to the idea that our ordinary mind works to block perceptions, works to help us survive. And that the taking of the drug is a liberation into the seeing of the 'is-ness of all being. Wisely however( unlike so many of his followers) he immediately understands that the price for such total absorption in the world of sight is the loss of human relations and purposive action.
It is possible to disagree with Huxley on many things, but he is a stimulating mind whose perceptions will no doubt add quality and flavor to the reader's own mental saga. ... Read more

Product Description
This Halcyon Classics ebook collection contains several works by noted English author Aldous Huxley, best known for his dystopian work 'A Brave New World.'In 'Crome Yellow,' Huxley satirizes contemporary English society through a collection of characters drawn together in an English country house.In addition to 'Crome Yellow,' Huxley's short story collection 'Mortal Coils' and some of his poetry (The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems) are also found here.Includes an active table of contents for easy navigation. ... Read more