It is distressingly easy to forget what a wonderful, remarkable writer Bradbury is. Censorship, defiance, desperation, even a bit of loyalty and love--it's all here, in Bradbury's lyrical prose. Fahrenheit 451 lacks the terror of Something Wicked This Way Comes, and it's not the mash note to childhood that Dandelion Wine is--and that's to its benefit. F451 is its own book, with its own sense of grim, anti-intellectual horror. When I first read this in 8th grade, I remember thinking that it was a bleak and depressing (but in a good way) hypothesis of the far-distant future, but as an adult, I fear that it's not that far off. I suspect Bradbury felt the same way in 1953 when he wrote it.