Reviews for Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (Bloom's Guides)

The average rating for Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (Bloom's Guides) based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-06-15 00:00:00 Nathan Varner There are some books that are so deep that you look forward to how other people interpret their core message - just to make sure that you did not miss anything. Fahrenheit 451 is such a book and this adaptation helped me to visualize several scenes that I was a little 'fuzzy' about. The introduction by Ray Bradbury is wonderful - the art is atmospheric; even the panel spacing conveys a feeling of being trapped in a world that has lost any semblance of sanity.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-01-27 00:00:00 Frank Bohlmann This is Ray Bradbury's authorised adaptation of his classic novel Fahrenheit 451 into a graphic novel illustrated by Tim Hamilton. In his introduction, Ray Bradbury says that he views this as yet another take on his original book - a "further rejuvenation", as he terms it. He can trace many elements of the story to ideas that had been percolating in his subconscious. The first was an occasion when he was taking a walk around the block, and was stopped and questioned by a police officer. The idea of being challenged for merely being a pedestrian took root. He also references an early story he wrote entitled "The Exiles", in which the greatest Fantasy authors in history were exiled to Mars, while their books were burned on Earth. Another story, "Usher II", was about a writer of Fantasy being made fun of by intellectuals, who ridiculed all the grotesques of Edgar Allan Poe. In "Pillar of Fire", a man rose from the dead to reenact "Dracula" and Frankenstein's monster. Bradbury states, "I brought all my characters onstage again and ran them through my typewriter, letting my fingers tell the stories and bring forth the ghosts of other tales from other times… What you have here now is a pastiche of my former lives, my former fears, my inhibitions and my strange and mysterious and unrecognized predictions of the future…what I did was name a metaphor and let myself run free, allowing my subconscious to surface with all kinds of wild ideas." Fahrenheit 451 lends itself surprisingly well to reinterpretation as a graphic novel. Of course with a superior tale such as this, the piece is bound to be story-led. Nevertheless the Artwork in this book is more than adequate, and adds another dimension to the story. It is a nice touch too that the reader is able not merely to visualise the books to be burned, but to actually see images of them! Most pages are predominantly yellow/reds, or cool blue/grey-greens with silhouettes in the after-dark periods, to enhance the mood. The story is as gripping as ever, and the characters declaim well in this stark medium, their speeches being undistracted by superfluous words, and the emotional power behind them heightened by the visual images. An enjoyable read, and a very good choice to be interpreted as a graphic novel.