Saturday, April 18, 2009

Brave New World - In Our Time podcast

Thanks to BBC's In Our Time I could learn a bit about that book that everybody else has read and refers to: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It is interesting to read in host Melvyn Bragg's newsletter, that although he has read the book, he needed the program also to be informed (again) about it.

"[...] if challenged, I would have nodded and said yes, I know that book. Well, I know the author’s name. I also knew that it involved a state a few hundred years after the death of Henry Ford. I remembered the alphas, betas, gamma, deltas and epsilons. I could call up the incubators and words like ‘feelies’ and ‘soma’ would drift around somewhere. But when taxed [...] to get a grip on it for In Our Time, I discovered how little you retain, even in areas where you have been programmed (now that would have fitted in with Brave New World) to remember."

I hope you have all downloaded the podcast, otherwise you will have to go and listen to the on-line stream, as this issue of In Our Time was broadcast more than a week ago. Last week's isseu was about Suffragism and I still have to listen. If I come round reviewing it, it will by then be no longer available. So the recommendation is as always: download In Our Time as soon as possible.

More In Our Time:
Rafael's School of Athens and the depiction of Plato and Aristotle,
The Boxer Rebellion,
The library of Alexandria,
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot,
The destruction of Carthage.

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