The Jungle

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.

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.

I could not even get started reading this book - it is really long, and the print is so tiny that my eyes get tired even when I wear my reading glasses.

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.