Island

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Children are our ultimate investment and also very much the ultimate investment of the tobacco companies, the ultimate investment of the liquor companies and, for sure, of the gun companies.

The kingdom has no military and its inhabitants have cultivated a nearly utopian society by blending the most applicable elements from western science and eastern Mahayana Buddhism, also adopting a multiple-parents child-rearing strategy of mutual adoption clubs (MACs), as well as a bilingual culture of English and Palanese. In private, Murugan reveals to Farnaby that he is in fact the Rani's son and will be assuming control over Pala in a few days as its new Raja. Well, you get a mishmash - an intellectual smorgasboard of irrelevant arcane trivia, pop thinking, and new age religion - LIKE THIS BOOK. You'll see a lot of criticism of "Island" based on the fact that many believe it to not be a "novel" at all.No, you accept the world and make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself. There's a message in all of his books and I already knew the message for this one: which society is better? It will take me two or three more reads—at least—to grok it in fullness, but it already feels as if some of the thoughts were for me, some of me. Island explores many of the themes and ideas that interested Huxley in the post- World War II decades and were the subject of many of his nonfiction books of essays, including Brave New World Revisited, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. In counterpoint to Brave New World and Ape and Essence , in Island Huxley gives us his vision of utopia.

To profess a final answer to any question one must first have a deep understanding of the question itself. You can find valid arguments that the works of Homer really aren't novels, that Cervantes' "Don Quixote" isn't a novel, and so on. For Young Huxley this was possible in the context of a universal totalitarian industrial society ruled by Philosopher Kings who could rescue independent souls and send them into exiles where they could be safe from consumer societies.Spiritual subjects, such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, interested Huxley, a humanist, towards the end of his life. Add to that Huxley's insights into the Western man's (or at least the Western-man-of-that-time's - the Hero's) innate dilemmas and insecurities and their root causes. Although it has a plot, the plot largely serves to further conceptual explorations rather than setting up and resolving conventional narrative tension. However, the debate set forth by Huxley is more than a little intriguing, and should definitely hold the attention of anyone who has dreamed of a better life for the world and the people in it. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.