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Completed	03 February 2009
Title	Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Author	Robert Louis Stevenson
Published	1886
Quote	"I was born in the year 18-- to a large fortune, endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellow-men, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature. In this case, I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged into shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but two."
Review	This book is about the duality of man, and it is quite disturbing. My brother just finished reading this book to his 8-year-old son, and so I read it soon thereafter. My nephew is into science and chemistry and experiments, so he naturally liked this book. And then we watched the movies of the same name. First, we watched the 1931 movie, which I've read is the best movie version. It was really disturbing! I don't really think it was fit for my nephew to view----the themes are too disturbing. Also disturbing was the fact that the movie so obviously detoured from the book plot. In the movie, Mr. Hyde took on a girlfriend, who he beat. How disturbing, and unnecessary! But wait, it gets even more disturbing: After the 1931 movie, we watched the 1941 remake with Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Lana Turner. What a cast! But what a terrible movie. When they say "remake" they are not kidding: This is a true remake of the 1931 movie----including the subplot of Mr. Hyde and his sleezy, sad girlfriend, none of which appeared in the book. All in all, I'd definitely suggest this book for a good read; it's a classic. But, save yourself the time and trouble and skip the movies.

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