Fahrenheit 451

451° Fahrenheit — the temperature at which paper ignites and burns. Bradbury's philosophical dystopia paints a bleak picture of the development of a post-industrial society: it is a world of the future where all written publications are ruthlessly destroyed by... a special squad of firefighters, and the storage of books is prosecuted by law, interactive television successfully serves the universal dumbing down, punitive psychiatry resolutely deals with rare dissenters, and an electric dog goes out hunting for incorrigible dissidents… A sensational statement by Bradbury in 2007 was that «Fahrenheit 451» is misunderstood. This book is not about government censorship; it is a story about how television destroys the interest in reading books. In the early 1950s, most Americans had never seen a television, yet Bradbury predicted the onset of a new era of freedom, abundance, and entertainment, where the desire to be happy, multiplied by political correctness, would lead to a ban on books. «Television tells you what to think, and hammers it into your head. It is always and necessarily right».