A woman in my book club recently thanked me for recommending this book to her: 'I had no idea this ever happened!' she said. But for what it is, it's a very good book, superbly read.Įveryone should read this book. It basically depends on what you're looking for: if you're looking for Dickens, this is not the book for you. So, as a piece of social commentary, I would rate this a five-star book, but as a novel much less. With the exception of the (excellent) first chapter and a handful of moving scenes later in the book, I felt there was no real existence to the characters, other than as illustrations. New immigrants fell prey to real estate scams? By all means, let's have that too. The political system was corrupt? Our character can also witness that first hand. Working conditions in the meat packing factory were horrifying? Let's have a character go through all the possible positions in the industry to illustrate this.

However, one thing that bothered me personally is that the characters and events in the book are basically nothing more than instruments, used by Sinclair to illustrate his points. Everything the summary says is true: The Jungle is a vivid portrait of life and death in a turn-of-the-century American meat-packing factory.

The jungle meat