content: I'm surprised that Noam Chomsky hasn't been mentioned in any of the 299 previous reviews. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not just a supreme work of art: it is politically relevant, because the phenomena identified by Orwell (doublethink, newspeak, etc.) are, in various forms, actively used today in even the freest societies. Chomsky gives very detailed descriptions of this. "I've repeatedly found," he says, "that when the audience is mostly poor and less educated, I can skip lots of the background ... because it's already obvious and taken for granted by everyone." Curious?