Product Description: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a vivid portrait of life and death in a turn-of-the-century American meat-packing factory. A grim indictment that led to government regulations of the food industry, The Jungle is Sinclair's extraordinary contribution to literature and social reform.
Survival of the most corrupt (3.5 stars) ^ Written in 1906, The Jungle is the very unhappy story of Jurgis, an illiterate Lithuanian immigrant, who finds work in the meat packing industry outside of Chicago. He marries his fiancée, Ona, and tries to create a decent life in America. Unfortunately, they and their extended family naïvely believe Jurgis alone will be able to support them - he is, after all, young, very strong, and entirely willing. But one by one everyone, including the children, is forced to take horrendously frightening jobs. They innocently fall prey to unscrupulous employers and lenders, becoming essentially paid slaves, wearing themselves out physically and morally.
From a literary standpoint (not that I'm an expert judge) I found the language and writing a bit flat, and it seems obvious that it was meant primarily as propaganda. However, the title is clever in that it evokes a lush, green, and paradisiacal setting (probably especially so to 1906 audiences), which is how many view the United States then and now. Instead the characters run into a reality every bit as menacing and dangerous as a real jungle would be. I also found the moral decay was portrayed in a very interesting and believable way: because of their desperate circumstances they initially accept the idea of the children working, to beating the traumatized 13 year old Stanislovas to get him to go to work on snowy days, to Ona's handling of her boss' advances. Apart from that, I think the book's merit stems mostly from the social and political implications.
I heard about this book many times in economics classes and I determined to eventually read it. But it is such an unhappy and miserable book that once I finally picked it up I regret I am unable to finish it, although I may come back to it another time (I listened to the audio book at the gym each morning and it's NOT a pleasant way to start the day, especially around the Christmas season). Nevertheless, this book was highly influential in 1906 in correcting some of the abuses in the food industry, leading to the eventual establishment of the FDA. Unfortunately, Sinclair's purpose in writing it was instead to expose the inhuman conditions the workers were subjected to, but this aspect received far less attention. And while the book misguidedly extols Socialism at the end as a panacea to the ills of Capitalism, it was a good illustration of the potential for abuse and corruption that is usually overlooked and ignored. True: it's fiction even if it is based on the reality Sinclair saw, but still a valid reminder that our capitalist system isn't perfect, and is perhaps a good counterpoint to George Orwell's 1984 (which my teenage son recently read for school and discussed with me).
So, while I didn't particularly enjoy reading it, I recognize the book's importance even though I think Socialism is a greater evil (I suspect Sinclair might have been very disturbed at the corruption later displayed by Socialist and Communist governments). The audio book version I listened to was read by Robert Morris, who does an excellent job, particularly with the Lithuanian accents.
Very useful ^ I needed this book for my son's history class. It was a very reasonable price and in perfect condition. Thanks!
Classic exposure of capitalism ^ This great novel exposes the appalling, brutal exploitation of American workers. Upton Sinclair shows how the employer uses unemployment to keep wages low and conditions vile.
He also shows how the employer Durham used immigration to undermine the workers. "The Bohemians had come then, and after them the Poles. People said that old man Durham himself was responsible for these immigrations; he had sworn that he would fix the people of Packingtown so that they would never again call a strike on him, and so he had sent his agents into every city and village in Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work and high wages at the stockyards. The people had come in hordes; and old Durham had squeezed them tighter and tighter, speeding them up and grinding them to pieces, and sending for new ones. The Poles, who had come by tens of thousands, had been driven to the wall by the Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians were giving way to the Slovaks."
One of my favorites ^ I first read this book about 8 years ago in a High School history class. Since then I have read it twice and I did a college thesis on it; it is one of my favorite books. The first time I read the hardcover book; the next two times I listened to the unabridged audiobook and enjoyed it so much better.
At Least Charles Dickens Could Write ^ Cicero once wrote, 'It is an outrageous abuse both of time and literature for a man to commit his thoughts to writing without having the ability either to arrange them or manifest them, or attract readers by some charm of style."
This book is a naturalistic novel with poor prose. Melodramatic and sensationalistic. It is functionally aligned to what was characterized as 'dime-novels' during the era in which it was written. The prose is so heinous it made me think the writer Mr. Sinclair must have been mentally exiguous. I had difficulty affirming in my own mind as I read this book that it was actually written by an adult, and not a fourteen-year-old child; notwithstanding a supposed professional novelist at that. Charles Dickens worked in a garment factory when he was a teenager as well as had a far less well-off beginning to life than that of Mr. Sinclair, yet Mr. Dickens could express with the most refined art and effort such an ease of pen dazzling the reader in every line. Dickens had indubitably an eye for detail and perfection that Sinclair's intellectual apathy could never aspire to grasp.
For a more eminent literary personification of the naturalistic novel genre, I would suggest reading Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. The naturalistic novel was always a phantasm of reality, but there were well-written ones and poorly written ones; this one by Upton Sinclair is a literary peril to say the least.
This book is exceptional only its ridiculousness. The characters are passive, dull, cliché, and often utterly puerile in their own conceptualization of their circumstances (this reflects upon the limited thought process of the writer).
In respect to the vulgarity discussed by Sinclair regarding the food industry of this era it should be noted the industry had already been exposed by various NON-fiction writers of the period (preceding Sinclair), and much (the emphasis being much, not all) of the industry had consequently been reformed apropos to the processing of food by the time this book was published. Essentially the government mandated regulatory reforms that were instituted the following year as a result of the popularity of this book were unnecessary, most significantly postulated on aberrational phenomena, and were superficial in remonstrance (oh but they made the public feel good inside). Conversely had Sinclair decided to be objective in his critique of the meatpacking industry in contrast to producing 'muckracking' so-called journalism derived out of his own subjective views in support of socialist ideology he would have discovered the previously mentioned actuality, but since this is a work of fiction he could write anything he wished, and he did. Why Sinclair went down the road of sensationalism in this novel may be attributable to the failures of his first four books. However, because he decided to go down that road he cannot be taken seriously as a scholar in any regard.
It should be noted that Sinclair was not merely a metaphorical socialist, he was a literal one (he was an unsuccessful Socialist Party candidate in the U.S.). In historical context Sinclair's political persuasion was during an era when the progressive political faction was gaining in popularity in America, so as a socialist ideologue he [Sinclair] was even further to the left politically than the progressives (he could be paralleled with a Michael Moore type in the present-era).
This book is a literary work of fiction, and should not be taken earnestly as a non-fictional scholarly critique. With that noted it also falls short in regard to literary style, and because the characters are passively portrayed by Sinclair in contrast to being actively portrayed it is difficult for the reader to form any authentic connection with them (they exist more as abstractions).
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