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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780399501487
Edition: 41st
ISBN: 0399501487
Label: Perigee Books
Manufacturer: Perigee Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: July 27, 1959
Publisher: Perigee Books
Studio: Perigee Books
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Beautifully written, tragic and provacative, an adventure culminizing in terror.
Amazon.com Review:
William Golding's classic tale about a group of English schoolboys who are plane-wrecked on a deserted island is just as chilling and relevant today as when it was first published in 1954. At first, the stranded boys cooperate, attempting to gather food, make shelters, and maintain signal fires. Overseeing their efforts are Ralph, "the boy with fair hair," and Piggy, Ralph's chubby, wisdom-dispensing sidekick whose thick spectacles come in handy for lighting fires. Although Ralph tries to impose order and delegate responsibility, there are many in their number who would rather swim, play, or hunt the island's wild pig population. Soon Ralph's rules are being ignored or challenged outright. His fiercest antagonist is Jack, the redheaded leader of the pig hunters, who manages to lure away many of the boys to join his band of painted savages. The situation deteriorates as the trappings of civilization continue to fall away, until Ralph discovers that instead of being hunters, he and Piggy have become the hunted: "He forgot his words, his hunger and thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear on flying feet." Golding's gripping novel explores the boundary between human reason and animal instinct, all on the brutal playing field of adolescent competition. --Jennifer Hubert
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
A great book to those who can understand its true meaning. Every object of the book has a meaning - the conch for unity. The beast for the darker side of humanity. Even Piggy - his logic and brains show that looks aren't everything. Lord of the Flies is a must for more mature readers.
Rating:  -
I ordered this book thinking it would be "The Lord of the Flies" in an easy to read version. It is not. It is more of a study guide. I wanted it for a student with dyslexia who needed to read it for summer reading. He couldn't use it. Someone should rewrite these books for kids with reading problems...
Rating: -
Lord of The Flies says alot of interesting things, and manages to do so in a concise and compelling manner. It's always a little odd when you re-read books you read as a child, and find you've missed out on a plethora of content. ..
At its core, this book is about the struggle within man; to live under the governance of civilization or to follow ones own desires, at any cost, and by any means. It's a question many of us face everyday. Most of us abide by society's rules, because we grasp the immediate benefits of doing so. Civilization guarantees a certain level of saftey, comfort, and happiness - if only at the expense of minor inconveniences. But what if all such guarantees were stripped away? Would we still behave, or would things quickly deteriorate?
This book poses that question, and asks it of school-aged boys - people not yet inhibited by a lifetime of authority and rules. The result? A few try to rebuild and a few revert to more "primitive" states. Power struggles ensue, theologies are constructed, and even taboos like death and murder are demystified. The end of innocence and the thirst for power.
The glamour of short term glory is pitted against the promise of a paramount but illusory goal - guess which one wins? This book can be read as a simple narrative, a philosophy, a social-experiment, an adventure story, a psychological treatise, or as a parable. It is intriguing at its least and brilliant at its best. My favorite character is Simon, a boy who tries to warn the others that ultimately, for man, their is no "beast" to fear - only the beast within.
Rating: -
this is a great book that shows the fallacies of human nature. i really enjoyed it and it has a great ending. everyone should read thsi book
Rating: -
This is one of my favorite books. At the beginning, we are told little of the world war that has led to the evacuation of these English schoolboys and the subsequent crash of their airplane on a remote tropical island, where they are left to fend for themselves, all adults having been killed.
12-year old Ralph is the first to emerge from the jungle undergrowth. Then, Piggy joins him. When they find a conch shell on the shore, Ralph blows it, which brings the other boys, including the choir, led by Jack. At first, the boys attempt to set up a democratic society. Ralph is elected "chief," and the conch shell is used to call assembly when decisions are required. Piggy's spectacles are used to raise a fire for rescue and roasting the wild pigs that are found in abundance on the island. Other than their isolation from the world, their greatest worry is the rumor of a beast on the island. However, as days go by, the island paradise crumbles as Jack challenges Ralph's leadership. By the end of the book, the island is in flames, two boys have been murdered, and Ralph is running for his life.
Although the boys range in ages 6 to 12, this is not a children's book. Indeed, the portrayal of their island society, degenerating from order to chaos and destruction, is so brutal that I'd probably not consider it for readers under 10. And yet, its theme of human nature and its predilection for violence and savagery is too important to overlook. This book should be required reading in every high school and college, because the characters are too well known to us, too much a part of our history and experience.
It would also be a mistake to think that the book implies that children are savages more brutal than their adult counterparts. Golding wrote this book at a time (the early 1950's) when it was fashionable for art to portray youth as an age of innocence in contrast to the corruption of adulthood (as exemplified in "The Catcher in the Rye"). Not so, Golding writes. This corruption is part of us, an innate part of Mankind itself, not something that comes with the experience of adulthood. We mustn't forget that this book is set at a time of world war.
The book is allegorical. Standing in opposition are the natural leaders, Ralph and Jack. Ralph represents good government, order, justice, restraint, responsibility, and common sense. His authority is represented by the conch, a symbol of stability, democracy, and civilization. Jack represents despotism, injustice, irresponsibility, lust for power, and oppression of the weak by the strong. His authority is the spear, which invokes fear and violence.
Piggy and Roger are respectively the henchmen of Ralph and Jack. Piggy is an overweight, asthmatic boy whose intellect and rationality make him a valuable advisor to Ralph and the object of loathing to Jack. His greatest contribution to the survival of the island civilization is his spectacles, which are used to make the fire. This is an apt symbol, since fire was ancient Man's first tool, separating him from the beasts and giving him the means to develop other technologies. Roger is a natural-born sadist who bullies the younger boys even before the decline of their civilization. An analysis on lordoftheflies.org calls him a force of primal evil. It is he whom Jack uses to maintain his control over the other boys of his "tribe" and it is he who kills Piggy on Castle Rock.
If Roger is the primal evil, Simon is the primal good. Simon is the most complicated character in Golding's novel. Although he sides with Ralph in his power struggle with Jack ("Go on being chief"), he remains an outsider to both groups. When Ralph's and Jack's groups splinter off, Piggy's prestige within Ralph's group rises, whereas Simon's falls. Piggy's dismissal of him as "batty" reveals the tension between Piggy's realism and Simon's spiritualism. Simon, however, sees what Piggy doesn't see. From the beginning, Simon believes that the feared beast is human ("Maybe it's us..."), to which Piggy contemptuously explodes, "Nuts!" Later, when the others have fled in fear from the beast on the mountaintop, only Simon is courageous enough to climb alone to the top to discover the truth, quietly trumping the bravado of Ralph and Jack. When Simon finds out that the beast is really a dead parachutist from the war-torn outside world, still strapped to his billowing parachute, he frees the corpse and returns to the others to share the truth before being ceremoniously and hysterically killed by them, thus fulfilling his role as Christ figure. Before his discovery, he stumbles upon the impaled head of a pig, presented to the beast as a gift by Jack and his superstitious savages. The scene that follows is a surreal conversation between the Head and Simon. Attended by a swarm of flies, the Head becomes a demonic apparition, confirming Simon's belief and threatening ... Read More
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