The Jungle

This book was written over 100 years ago but is just as relevant today. At the time, while the story is about the desperate plight of the poor, people instead focused on the food safety issues and enacted laws to protect people from the tainted food being sold. Today as deregulation has been taking effect and social programs such as food stamps, welfare, and unemployment are being cut, people are again facing tainted food and starvation due to an inability to work. This should be required reading so people may understand why these laws and programs were instituted in the first place to protect workers from corporate greed which goes wild when left unchecked. At the end of the book the author envisions a day when automation will ease the lives of the worker and drop prices. I wonder if he would be shocked to find that while we have automation today and overall the worker's life is not quite so hard, prices have done nothing but rise and squeeze the working man. Also, the fact that the practices in the slaughter houses have changed very little in the past 100 years. It is only in the last few years that Temple Grandin made some inroads in making things easier for the cattle so they are less dangerous to handle and only a few places have accepted her methods. The description of the slaughter house in the recently published book "The Almond Tree" could have just as easily been the one described in "The Jungle". It is a brutal book to read but is written so well the reader wants to know what will happen next and continues to read. Few books hold up this well over time, but the sad part is that so much of what is written is still true for so many workers today.

This book is a conundrum. As noted by my title, the first two thirds is very good, and tells the story of Jurgis Rudkus and his family's ill-fated migration from Lithuania to America. They find their way to Chicago, and then several family members go through a series of highs and lows, finding work, losing work, gettting taken by unscrupulous bankers and lawyers, getting injured on the job, being forced into sexual relationships to keep jobs, etc. The early part of the book centers on Packingtown, and this part of the book is riveting and well written. After a series of incredible misfortunes, the main character, Jurgis, takes to the road and discovers a bit of America. This section of the book is also interesting, though sketchy. Clearly, Sinclair was beginning to either run out of gas or run out of interest in the story. In the last third of the book, Jurgis returns to Chicago and attends a socialist rally in which he gets converted to this economic doctrine. At that point, the story of Jurgis is largely abandoned, and the last 15% (on kindle) of the book is a series of speeches and monologues on the wonders of socialism. This section was for the most part unreadable, and this is coming from someone who considers himself a liberal! The end doesn't actually even reference Jurgis, so the reader has no idea what happens to him at the end of the story. He simply vanishes from the narrative. I had considered using this for a college level class in Economic Geography, but the last portion of the book was just too slow and preachy, as others have noted here. What is interesting is that within these pages is a GREAT novel, if only he had concentrated on Jurgis' story. The scenes in the meat packing houses are incredibly well written (and hard to read), but that part of the book is completely wrapped about halfway through. So, in conclusion, this may be a classic, but I believe that judgment is mainly for the first two thirds of the book. As a previous reviewer noted, don't feel bad that you don't read to the end, since the story of Jurgis is concluded earlier than that, as is the narrative.

Amazing writing. I'm not sure why this wasn't required reading when I was in school, or why I never was into reading classic novels in my younger years, but I'm glad I finally got around to reading "The Jungle." I can see why the book created such a stir. This novel, written at the end of the gilded-age, shows the great divide created by unregulated capitalism, showing how workers and consumers can end up bearing the heavy burden, the real cost, of maintaining the lifestyles of the rich and powerful, how the American dream of working hard to succeed does not work when the cards are stacked against you. Funny how some of these same problems are with us again. How easy it is to assume the free market can regulate itself, after generations of living in a regulated market. People seem to forget the first principle of business is to make a profit. The ending was a weak point by today's standards. There was hope that socialism would address all the flaws of social inequity. Obviously, that never happened, though political changes were enacted to address some of the inequities. Socialism was a dream never realized and I'm not sure I'd want the author's final solution. It reminded me of Ayn Rand, escaping from Communism and seeing Capitalism as the ultimate system of perfection. The grass is always greener . . . The theories of government never translate into practice with the lofty ideals or ethics of the philosophers who write about a perfect society. I doubt there is any system (including capitalism) that would be successful if not tempered to address the ways humans devise to scam the system. What I found most interesting is the nation's current drift into a second gilded-age. It makes this a frightening powerful novel, a modern-day warning. I wish it was required reading.

This story was an incredibly vivid depiction of what immigrants faced when coming to the Capitalist haven with visions of wealth and abundance dancing in their minds. The reality strikes quickly as the dog-eat-dog rules and political corruption crushes those dreams. The book is incredibly written and pulls you in wondering what will happen next. Unfortunately, most of that experience will be a dance in the corruption and repression of that era. I found the book incredibly educating as I believe the writer intended it to. I'll pause before eating corned beef hash and other process meats hoping that things have changed. The downside for me is not the vivid exposing nature of the book though. The ending is anti-climatic. This incredibly engaging tale is ended with an overlong political speech in favor of socialism. The development and exploration of the main character is all but abandoned in favor of this long-winded political grandstanding.

For the first time reader this book will go down into memory forever. How graphic it is in detail and how the description of working poor tug at the heart strings. Sinclair has taken us deep into the workings of the meat packing industry in the early20th. century. The utter callousness and disregard of the industry bosses for the workers who did all the hard and dirty work. How the supervisors on the meat factory floor took advantage of the workers, the landlords and loan companies that all but rendered these workers pursuing the American dream into a nightmare. In places I had to skip pages because I became tearful and could not read further. I could not help comparing the travails of the Lithuanian family in this book struggling in Chicago to the poor Mexican laborers in our San Joaquin Valley farms who live even today under slightly better conditions than slavery to put produce within our reach. American capitalism hasn't changed in over 100 years to any appreciable degree. Yesterday it was the African American, Irish, the Italian and east Europeans and now it is the Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadoran slaves working for us. When will American industry learn to be fair and considerate with its own people ? Read up about Egypt of the pharaohs. That is a clear 4500 years ago when the Egyptian farmer-laborers built the great pyramids. The nobility of this colossal work out of a few laborers not with whips and deprivation but with care and consideration. Is America less civilized now than man thousands of years ago ? I thank Upton Sinclair who wrote this book.

I've wanted to read this for quite awhile, as I know that it is considered a classic. It was very useful in informing me of some of the issues of the era in which it was written/set. The author obviously had some passion around the issues and presented the story in a heart wrenching manner. All of that I appreciated. If I were just analyzing it as I would any other book, I don't think it did a good job of tying up some of the questions it raised in the story narrative. In some books that is intentional, in this it did not feel that way. Also, kind of a harsh read for younger/sensitive readers.

To start with, this is a book about the working conditions of the poor at the end of Guilded Age America. Our main character, Jurdis, arrives in America from Lithuania and makes the journey to Chicago where they found themselves in the heart of the meat packing industry. The slums were overcrowded, dirty, mortality rate is high, and it wasn't long before the Lithuanian immigrants started dropping like flies. Until only Jurdis Rudkus, Martha, and Elizebta remained. The book's main theme resonates around how bad members of the lower class are living. All around them, the hierarchy is cheating them for every penny and hard labor. Party bosses pay off politicians and law enforcement, cheating and scamming those below them. While their goons do the dirty work. Jurdis went from meat packing worker, to farmer, to miner, to steel worker, and finally janitor. He had mingled with a lot of people who had either helped him or contributed to his ruin. Through it all he observes the hierarchy and the patterns that the upper class use over the lower, noting how each layer of the hierarchy is trying to cheat those below them. The whole system was rigged, and despite the efforts of socialists and worker strikes, the men in power crushed each uprising without much effort. But what really made the book immortalized within American culture was its graphic description of the conditions within the meat packing industry. Ice from a contaminated pond was harvested and served to regular folks, as there were no electric refrigeration that day Medicines are also questionable, no way of telling if the drugs are even real or effective. Canned meat and sausage products got the worst of it all. Animals were abused upon transport, some even got sick. Spoiled and tuberculosis-infected meat got mixed into the cans, along with rat meat, rat feces, horse, and on occasion human body parts. In one page, a whole man fell into a vat and got turned into lard! Yes, there were government inspectors, but they were either bribed by the party bosses or were just too lazy to do their work properly. Yes, there were scandals relating to the conditions of the meat packing industry, but they were quieted down. There was one passage in the scene where one of Jurdis's young relatives, who was only three, died within hours after eating tainted sausage meat. The book was pretty descriptive of the child's suffering, no need for me to repeat it here. The book was published in February 26, 1906, and it hit people in the gut. President Theodore Roosevelt damned the book as socialist propaganda, but after reading it he sent inspectors to Chicago to investigate. Sure enough, they found the working conditions appalling. Months later, on June 4, 1906, the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act were enacted. According to Maura Spiegel's introduction in my Barnes & Noble Classics copy, Sinclair was known for quoting, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." He was trying to advocate for working conditions, not health conditions, of the lower class. No doubt this sat unsettled in his mind. I have read the tainted meat passages of the book to people in my college, and they were outright disgusted. My history professor explained that party bosses still rule Chicago, but it was not as bad today as it was during the Guilded Age. If you ever wonder about why we have an FDA, this book is the real reason why. As it brought light about the horrid conditions of the food being produced which later finds its way on your dinner plate.

It's a story that begins as if you had a microscope into the souls of real people, who are desperate, hard working slaves to a big machine. Then you zoom out and get a broader look at the machine and its negative impact on its immediate surroundings. All the while, you follow the central character, who is very naïve to begin with, but through so much experience learns, first hand how the entire system operates. Finally, you will see the broadest picture of a corrupted system that will destroy any and every thing to preserve its own wealth and keep a thumb on the working-class people who are either too busy or too ignorant to organize and abolish it. Sounds so familiar! You will be shocked by so many atrocities and it will be difficult not to feel empathy for the characters, who destroy themselves in the name of Capitalism. Time and again the protagonist is put through trials that would cause you or I to curl up and die! It's a very dark book with a very good message and I recommend it to all! P.S. I haven't read the other reviews, but I'm willing to bet that many of them will warn of the slaughterhouse scenes, which made me REALLY happy to be a vegetarian!