{"id":25822,"date":"2020-03-12T13:09:18","date_gmt":"2020-03-12T18:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=25822"},"modified":"2020-03-12T10:21:36","modified_gmt":"2020-03-12T15:21:36","slug":"on-the-world-of-george-orwell-by-michael-sheldon-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/12\/on-the-world-of-george-orwell-by-michael-sheldon-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"On <em>The World of George Orwell<\/em> by Michael Sheldon (2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/theworldofgeorgeorwell.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">This audio course is entitled <em>The World of George Orwell<\/em>, and that describes the content of the course.  It&#8217;s partly a biography, partly a history of the early part of the 20th century in which Orwell lived, and partly a discussion of his works.  It&#8217;s a seven disc, 14 lecture set that culminates in discussion of <em>Animal Farm<\/em> and <em>1984<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a Modern Scholar course, so it&#8217;s 2 lectures longer than a similar Teaching Company\/Great Courses lecture series, and it&#8217;s slightly lower quality.  The professor presenting has a more sonorous voice, a little less dynamic, and he repeats himself a lot&#8211;sometimes the same sentence, he says in a slightly different way twice in a row.  Still, he&#8217;s a homer&#8211;he loves his subject and has enthusiasm for Orwell which serves to mitigate the delivery.<\/p>\n<p>So, biographically, a sickly young man with an education above what his upbringing might have borne decides instead of the military to join the imperial police, and he gets stationed in Burma.  After a couple years, he returns home after an illness and to the disappointment of his family.  He decides to be a writer and starts to write.  He serves and is grievously wounded in the Spanish Civil War.  And he returns to the United Kingdom and writes a number of books that don&#8217;t really go anywhere.  He struggles with his publisher, gets married and loses his wife, endures World War II, and then hits big with <em>Animal Farm<\/em> and <em>1984<\/em>.  And then he dies.<\/p>\n<p>Somehow the lectures diminished Orwell, or at least my concept of him.  He seems a shabby little socialist who punched above his weight with a couple of good essays and a couple of books that captured the anti-communist zeitgeist of the middle part of the twentieth century.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This audio course is entitled The World of George Orwell, and that describes the content of the course. It&#8217;s partly a biography, partly a history of the early part of the 20th century in which Orwell lived, and partly a discussion of his works. It&#8217;s a seven disc, 14 lecture set that culminates in discussion [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio-courses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25822"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25823,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25822\/revisions\/25823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}