Ryan Holiday's Review of Fahrenheit 451

“Like many public school kids, I was assigned Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in high school. I remembered the book as a warning against totalitarian censorship by the government. It was only later, re-reading it as an adult, that I realized Bradbury—who had written the book on purchased time at a library typewriter—was depicting something much more insidious. As Captain Beatty explains to Montag, who had begun to doubt his terrible profession, censorship was what the people wanted. This horrendous burning of books hadn’t been forced on them by a tyrant. They had chosen this.