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Shooting an Elephant
A collection of eighteen essays by the author of Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm, etc. these represent the last of his finished work. There is excellent reading here, whether it be the title piece on the English colonial attitude, or his thoughts on books, poetry, cigarettes, a report on a hanging and a death, reflections on Gandhi, a toad, English murder, and other assorted topics, and in the field of the essay this provides fine style as well as stimulating thinking. For the selective reader as well as his established followers. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. -
Down and Out in Paris and London (Penguin Modern Classics)
Autobiographical work by George Orwell, published in 1933. Orwell's first published book, it contains essays in which actual events are recounted in a fictionalized form. The book recounts that to atone for the guilt he feels about the conditions under which the disenfranchised and downtrodden peoples of the world exist, Orwell decides to live and work as one of them. Dressed as a beggar, he takes whatever employment might be available to a poverty-stricken outcast of Europe. In Paris he lives in a slum and works as a dishwasher. The essay "How the Poor Die" describes conditions at a charity hospital there. In London's East End, he dresses and lives like his neighbors, who are paupers and the poorest of working-class laborers. Dressed as a tramp, he travels throughout England with hoboes and migrant laborers.