Down and Out in Paris and London
'You have talked so often of going to the dogs – and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.' George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time among the desperately poor and destitute in London and Paris is a moving tour of the underworld of society. Here he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor – sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses, working as a dishwasher in the vile 'Hotel X', living alongside tramps, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts – in an unforgettable account of what being down and out is really like.
Stats for nerds
50recommend
100mentions
86people
2009–2026years
59% recommend40% neutral1% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- N=1 but reading “Down and Out in Paris & London” by George Orwell really helped me out these things into perspective.
- I'm a huge fan of Eric Blair's writing. Looking at the bookshelf now: "Down and out in Paris and London" is what I've reread the most (I've got two copies, one ready for gifting).
- > you can’t control every Taco Bell
Restaurants and fast-food outlets generally can't/don't avoid their staff making sketchy health decisions.
Don't eat at them if you're worried.
Read anything about back-kitchens and staff's interesting attitudes towards health risks.
I highly recommend Kitchen Confidential - amazing novel writing.
Although my intro to the genre was 1933's Down and Out in Paris and London (an upper-middle class хорошо horrorshow). An all-time favorite book.
- Down and out in Paris and London was a life changing read for me :)
- This is a sad state of affairs.
I hope wherever you live can pull out of the dive.
Libraries are amazing and I would say that the fact they are so under funded and eventually turn into little more than a place to sleep, is very unfortunate.
I have woken up so much, sitting in a library for days, reading, reading, reading ..
If it weren’t for libraries, I’d have only read 1984 and not Down and Out in Paris and London, nor the one about Aspidispira, works with gravitas which fundamentally changed my opinion about personal responsibility at a respectable age.
I wonder if any of those homeless folk get a chance to talk to the ghosts of those aisles. Probably the library worked, once.
- Yeah there are good accounts of this in Down and Out in Paris and London and also one of Hemingway's books - forgot which one.
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