Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England as I
    trust shall never be put out.
           -Hugh Latimer

Guy Montag is a Fireman, but in the future envisioned by Ray Bradbury, firemen don't put out fires, they start them.  Firemen are responsible for burning books; all of which are banned, so that the people of this dystopia will not be troubled by difficult thoughts.  Instead of reading, they watch endless soap operas on large screen TV's and the government provides for all their needs.  Guy has had some qualms about his job, but he's never really thought through exactly what it is he's doing.  But then, in short order, he meets an odd young neighborhood girl named Clarisse McClellan, his wife nearly kills herself with sleeping pills and, finally, when the firemen are called to an old woman's house, she refuses to leave:

    Montag placed his hand on the woman's elbow.  "You can come with me,"

    "No," she said.  "Thank you, anyway."

    "I'm counting to ten," said Beatty.  "One. Two."

    "Please," said Montag.

    "Go on," said the woman.

    "Three. Four."

    "Here." Montag pulled at the woman.

    The woman relied quietly, "I want to stay here."

    "Five. Six."

    "You can stop counting," she said.  She opened the fingers of one hand slightly and in the palm of
    the hand was a single slender object.

    An ordinary kitchen match.

And before they can light the fire, she lights it herself and Guy is forced to consider what it is about books that would make a person do such a thing.  As he tells his wife:

    Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years.  And I though about
    books.  And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books.  A man had
    to think them up.  A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper.  And I'd never
    thought of that before.

As it turns out, the old woman has, like Hugh Latimore, lit a fire that will change the world, because Guy joins the nascent resistance to the book-burning government.

He remembers meeting an old man named Faber in a park some time earlier and the hunch he had that the man had a book.  Indeed, when Guy tracks him down, it turns out that Faber was a professor and he explains to Guy why books are of value:

    Number one, ... quality of information.  Number two: leisure to digest it.  And number three: the
    right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.

Each bolstering the other's confidence, Guy and Faber set out to resist the system and, ultimately, Guy escapes to the wilderness beyond the city, where wandering bands of men are preserving great texts in memory, against the day when the knowledge is needed and learning is again valued.

While not quite in a league with Orwell or Koestler, Bradbury's classic tale is an important treatment of the central themes of the century (of every century).  His vision of a society where people have traded freedom for security had a particular resonance during the Cold War, but it should continue to be read as a cautionary tale.  We head to the new millennium in the midst of the most spectacular flowering of Freedom that the world has ever known, but there is a continual tension in the species, between those who value that freedom, whatever its costs, and those who would choose the security offered by a controlled society and those who are afraid of uncomfortable ideas. freedom has the upper hand, but the struggle continues…

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Grade: (A-)