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adriannagrezak's review against another edition
5.0
I understand this book better as an immigrant and granddaughter of grandparents who dedicated two decades of their lives to harsh conditions in factories.
kimeeg's review against another edition
5.0
One of the best writings to illustrate the need for unions and what workplaces were like without them
michele_la's review against another edition
...TGIO. Sorry, but that was a painful slog. Satisfying, but not enjoyable. Something like social homework.
ronnie2024's review against another edition
This is a horrifying book! Written in classic muckraking style, it was promoted as an exposé of the conditions and practices at the Chicago stockyards. Sinclair actually intended it to be a chronicle of the lives of the desperate immigrants who worked there. Robbed of their money, their humanity, and their hope, their lives teetered between life and death. While the conditions at the Yards were addressed by T.R. and his passing of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, the plight of the workers received no such acknowledgement.
I will admit to skimming the last 50 pages or so which are a paean to the glories of socialism.
I will admit to skimming the last 50 pages or so which are a paean to the glories of socialism.
austra78's review against another edition
5.0
Few things are as enjoyable as reading a good book. Just finished Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”, one of those books that leaves burnt into your memory scenes difficult to forget, one can still quote paragraphs from “Jude the Obscure” or “Crime & Punishment” after more than two decades. Sinclair’s novel addresses in documentary detail the ruthless capitalist system of the early 20th Century, the exploitation of immigrant workers and the filthy unhygienic practices of the meat industry. Issues which more than a 100 years later are very much present day
finalcut's review against another edition
4.0
Wow. What more can you say about this book? The Jungle was the first "classic" I ever picked up on my own to just read for fun and it really hit me in the gut - no pun intended. The story really brings the nasty reality of life in the early 1900's to life. It also left me wondering how much better the meat processing industry is today.
Don't let the books reputation of being all about meat packing deter you though - the story that surrounds the main character deals with politics and the hard scrabble life in Chicago at the turn of the century. It's a good story to go along with the expose' of the meat industry.
Don't let the books reputation of being all about meat packing deter you though - the story that surrounds the main character deals with politics and the hard scrabble life in Chicago at the turn of the century. It's a good story to go along with the expose' of the meat industry.
sinningsammy's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
This story is disgustingly descriptive. It is definitely worth reading but it’s not something I have interest in reading multiple times
j_rowley's review against another edition
2.0
Starts out strong. We follow group of immigrants into America. We watch them struggle for food, work, shelter. We see industry around the turn of the century. We see the graft and corruption, unions vs owners. We continue to follow the family, then we spend the last 50 pages or more getting a lecture on socialism. I think the author could have given us a more effective message by wrapping it into the story better. Beginning good, and gross thanks to what happens in the slaughter houses, but the book could have ended quite well after Jurgis returned to the family and got a job.
kleonora's review against another edition
2.0
Verdict: The book that aimed for the heart and hit the stomach, a bleak a frequently stomach churning account of factory life in Chicago depressing for its relevance a century later.
In what is far from a unique experience, I first encountered The Jungle in high school. We didn’t actually have to read it at the time, though I would have jumped at the chance to substitute it for The Grapes of Wrath. Not just because Grapes of Wrath is intolerable, but because The Jungle sounded kinda cool. It was, our textbooks informed us, about the meat packing industry and was so disgusting it pretty much resulted in the immediate creation of the FDA. Everyone loves a good gross-out book and I have since spent the intervening years vaguely wondering at the horrors contained within the pages of The Jungle.
Well I’ve finally read it and I have to say, I think my textbook (and evidently the contemporary American public) kinda missed the point of this book as in, its not really about the food now, is it? The story begins with Jurgis and Co. coming over from Lithuania and ending up in Chicago’s meat packing district, the aptly named Packingtown. Men, women and children alike all have to fight to get menial and typically disgusting jobs in which they must work ceaseless long hours in order to stay in employment and cover the spiralling costs of a crappy house that, though they bought it, will now be actually owned by them for another 6 years. Following so far? Anyway, the granddad dies from having his feet melt into the caustic pickle he works in. A crippled child dies from bad meat. Another child has his fingers snap off in a cold spell (later he is eaten by rats like Kenny from South Park) and eventually Jurgis’ pregnant wife Ona has to prostitute herself in order for the family to not all die.
Jurgis finds out about this and goes and beats the shite out of the boss that coerced her into the oldest profession and is promptly shut in jail. While there his family is kicked out of their house for failing to meet payments. He finally finds them in time for Ona to die in childbirth. Then his first son drowns in the mud outside the house. Then Jurgis decides ‘screw it’ and leaves the dregs of his relatives behind to ‘hobo it’ in the country for a bit. The winter drives him back to Packingtown but he is blacklisted on account of the attempted boss-murder earlier. He bops around different occupations for a while so that we, the reader, may see the full extent of corruption and misery in Chicago. After delving deeper in to the mire of muggers, prostitutes, fops and politicians Jurgis finally finds Socialism, hoorah! The final chapters of the book consist of a lecture on this particular system of government, an election, and a call to arms, comrades!
The actual story isn’t all that important. It’s really just a vehicle for Sinclair to illustrate the plight of the people and the extent of the corruption of the system. In fact, often when the story can’t be configured so that one of the characters experiences an injustice first hand, a neighbour will drop by to tell them about the dirty tricks played by land lords or how politicians buy votes. As for the gross food, sure there is quite a bit of stomach churning description but this is first and foremost a tragic tale of desperate people fighting for survival in America, the land of false promises. America read it and cried aloud as one voice ‘There’s WHAT in my sausage?!?’ and now we have food regulatory standards which help (a little) in making sure that our ham is not made from cholera-pig. Ta-da!
If I’m coming off as disillusioned then I’m doing this right. While reading The Jungle, I also watched a documentary called ‘Food INC’ because I am unemployed and running low on things to watch on Netflix. It was a good companion to The Jungle, looking at very much the same issues 100 years on. For this reason it was also crushingly depressing. So yeah, the gross food issue had gotten marginally better but there’s still a ways to go before we get our milk pus-free and our meat not showered in hydrochloric acid. On the human side (i.e. the more important issue) things appear to have changed not at all.
Tarheel N.C is the largest slaughterhouse of pigs in the world today but take away its electric lighting and it fits right into The Jungle. The people there work the same monotonous, dangerous jobs for the same long hours with the same crap pay. Sure, we’ve got improved employment regulations now, but luckily for Smithfields of Tarheel, these don’t apply to illegal immigrants. Smithfields openly advertises for workers in Mexico just the same as the Meat bosses of Packingtown advertised in Poland, Slovakia and Lithuania. At least in The Jungle these people then became American citizens. The icing on a job in Tarheel is that every morning customs officials carry off 15 illegals so every day you show up to work you enter this perverse lottery. With only 15 people short a day, managers (who are never charged with hiring illegal immigrants in the first instance) can easily recruit 15 more aliens to fill the gap all while paying lip service to border control.
Apologies. Allow me to catch my breath and climb down off my soapbox. I guess my point is; what’s the point? 100 years ago Upton Sinclair wrote a depressing provocative book causing waves of outrage across America and after a century all we’ve managed to do is put expiration dates on our yogurt. At this point The Jungle isn’t so much a call to arms as an admission of defeat. We’ve tried, I’m sure we have. One hundred years of politics and policies, of reformers and rebels but we’re still in the exact same place. The gap between rich and poor is growing each year. Burmese children make our clothes, the price of which rise at a rate our salaries can’t match. To top it off, I’ve just learned a lasagne I bought from Tesco 3 weeks ago was 100% Romanian horse. Even the meat bosses in The Jungle drew the line at horsemeat. So, yeah, what is the point of this book? It had one in 1908 but in 2013 it is just a testament to human greed and human failure.
Not that this is Upton’s fault. He did what he could and actually effected some change. All I can blame on him is not providing a better answer to the problems he illustrated, but then again this was before we proved super-conclusively that humans as incapable of true Socialism as they are of flying. The Jungle is a clear 2. Context and intention keep it from a one, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you desire explicit illustration that human progress is a lie.
In what is far from a unique experience, I first encountered The Jungle in high school. We didn’t actually have to read it at the time, though I would have jumped at the chance to substitute it for The Grapes of Wrath. Not just because Grapes of Wrath is intolerable, but because The Jungle sounded kinda cool. It was, our textbooks informed us, about the meat packing industry and was so disgusting it pretty much resulted in the immediate creation of the FDA. Everyone loves a good gross-out book and I have since spent the intervening years vaguely wondering at the horrors contained within the pages of The Jungle.
Well I’ve finally read it and I have to say, I think my textbook (and evidently the contemporary American public) kinda missed the point of this book as in, its not really about the food now, is it? The story begins with Jurgis and Co. coming over from Lithuania and ending up in Chicago’s meat packing district, the aptly named Packingtown. Men, women and children alike all have to fight to get menial and typically disgusting jobs in which they must work ceaseless long hours in order to stay in employment and cover the spiralling costs of a crappy house that, though they bought it, will now be actually owned by them for another 6 years. Following so far? Anyway, the granddad dies from having his feet melt into the caustic pickle he works in. A crippled child dies from bad meat. Another child has his fingers snap off in a cold spell (later he is eaten by rats like Kenny from South Park) and eventually Jurgis’ pregnant wife Ona has to prostitute herself in order for the family to not all die.
Jurgis finds out about this and goes and beats the shite out of the boss that coerced her into the oldest profession and is promptly shut in jail. While there his family is kicked out of their house for failing to meet payments. He finally finds them in time for Ona to die in childbirth. Then his first son drowns in the mud outside the house. Then Jurgis decides ‘screw it’ and leaves the dregs of his relatives behind to ‘hobo it’ in the country for a bit. The winter drives him back to Packingtown but he is blacklisted on account of the attempted boss-murder earlier. He bops around different occupations for a while so that we, the reader, may see the full extent of corruption and misery in Chicago. After delving deeper in to the mire of muggers, prostitutes, fops and politicians Jurgis finally finds Socialism, hoorah! The final chapters of the book consist of a lecture on this particular system of government, an election, and a call to arms, comrades!
The actual story isn’t all that important. It’s really just a vehicle for Sinclair to illustrate the plight of the people and the extent of the corruption of the system. In fact, often when the story can’t be configured so that one of the characters experiences an injustice first hand, a neighbour will drop by to tell them about the dirty tricks played by land lords or how politicians buy votes. As for the gross food, sure there is quite a bit of stomach churning description but this is first and foremost a tragic tale of desperate people fighting for survival in America, the land of false promises. America read it and cried aloud as one voice ‘There’s WHAT in my sausage?!?’ and now we have food regulatory standards which help (a little) in making sure that our ham is not made from cholera-pig. Ta-da!
If I’m coming off as disillusioned then I’m doing this right. While reading The Jungle, I also watched a documentary called ‘Food INC’ because I am unemployed and running low on things to watch on Netflix. It was a good companion to The Jungle, looking at very much the same issues 100 years on. For this reason it was also crushingly depressing. So yeah, the gross food issue had gotten marginally better but there’s still a ways to go before we get our milk pus-free and our meat not showered in hydrochloric acid. On the human side (i.e. the more important issue) things appear to have changed not at all.
Tarheel N.C is the largest slaughterhouse of pigs in the world today but take away its electric lighting and it fits right into The Jungle. The people there work the same monotonous, dangerous jobs for the same long hours with the same crap pay. Sure, we’ve got improved employment regulations now, but luckily for Smithfields of Tarheel, these don’t apply to illegal immigrants. Smithfields openly advertises for workers in Mexico just the same as the Meat bosses of Packingtown advertised in Poland, Slovakia and Lithuania. At least in The Jungle these people then became American citizens. The icing on a job in Tarheel is that every morning customs officials carry off 15 illegals so every day you show up to work you enter this perverse lottery. With only 15 people short a day, managers (who are never charged with hiring illegal immigrants in the first instance) can easily recruit 15 more aliens to fill the gap all while paying lip service to border control.
Apologies. Allow me to catch my breath and climb down off my soapbox. I guess my point is; what’s the point? 100 years ago Upton Sinclair wrote a depressing provocative book causing waves of outrage across America and after a century all we’ve managed to do is put expiration dates on our yogurt. At this point The Jungle isn’t so much a call to arms as an admission of defeat. We’ve tried, I’m sure we have. One hundred years of politics and policies, of reformers and rebels but we’re still in the exact same place. The gap between rich and poor is growing each year. Burmese children make our clothes, the price of which rise at a rate our salaries can’t match. To top it off, I’ve just learned a lasagne I bought from Tesco 3 weeks ago was 100% Romanian horse. Even the meat bosses in The Jungle drew the line at horsemeat. So, yeah, what is the point of this book? It had one in 1908 but in 2013 it is just a testament to human greed and human failure.
Not that this is Upton’s fault. He did what he could and actually effected some change. All I can blame on him is not providing a better answer to the problems he illustrated, but then again this was before we proved super-conclusively that humans as incapable of true Socialism as they are of flying. The Jungle is a clear 2. Context and intention keep it from a one, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you desire explicit illustration that human progress is a lie.