St. Drogo's Books

Animal Farm seems like a very socially safe denouncement of the hypocrisy and evils of Stalinist communism now, but at the time of it's publication just after WWII, it was actually quite controversial. At the time, Stalin was everyone's darling for his involvement in the war. Animal Farm shows how a revolution by farm animals to drive out their selfish master Jones and take control of the farm production for themselves almost immediately becomes a new and even worse dictatorship under clever but selfish leadership.

P. 10 - "Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself."

P. 139 - "No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."