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dipescara's review against another edition
3.0
a lot of insights about WW1 but this was a brutal slog for me.
400mom's review against another edition
4.0
The only one of Upton Sinclair’s books I had read was The Jungle, in high school. I thought it was icky and it had the disadvantage of being required reading. But this book sounded interesting and I didn’t realize it was the 1st in an 11-book series.
I have seen reviews which compare this series to Winds of War or to Forrest Gump. Both of these comparisons make sense but this book seems deeper than either of those. It is the description of the thought process of Lanny Budd as he is attracted to one viewpoint after another that makes this book worth reading. I don’t know that I will ever read all 11 books in the series but I’m interested in the next few, for sure.
I have seen reviews which compare this series to Winds of War or to Forrest Gump. Both of these comparisons make sense but this book seems deeper than either of those. It is the description of the thought process of Lanny Budd as he is attracted to one viewpoint after another that makes this book worth reading. I don’t know that I will ever read all 11 books in the series but I’m interested in the next few, for sure.
halkid2's review against another edition
5.0
As someone with a keen interest in both World Wars, I have been meaning to tackle the Lanny Budd series of historical novels since first learning about them perhaps five years ago. (It is a shame they are now so forgotten, especially since the third book of the series won author Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) a Pulitzer Prize.) Written between 1940-53, Sinclair's novels use the life of Lanny Budd to tell the sequential history of Europe and America in the first half of the 20th century. So, now I have completed the first of 11 books. And it is nothing short of a masterpiece! Readable, compelling, full of distinctive and interesting characters, and deeply informative about both history and politics. In fact, much of it seems relevant to current events.
WORLD'S END begins in 1914 when the central character of Lanny Budd is 14-- the son of a wealthy, American arms manufacturer, Robbie Budd, and a beautiful French woman who goes by the nickname Beauty. Though his parents don't live together, Lanny remains a child of privilege, growing up in Southern France amid cosmopolitan members of the elite class, who are themselves primarily focused on, travel, social activities and the arts.
Attending the best schools, Lanny is popular, excels at his studies, and forms close friendships with fellow students Rick (British) and Kurt (German), who later wind up on opposites sides of the coming World War. Fiercely loyal, honest, intelligent, and curious -- Lanny quickly becomes someone for us to both love and admire. Like me, you will no doubt identify with him, as I'm sure the author intended. Because Lanny, aside from being central to the story, also serves as the character who winds up asking the difficult questions and examining contradictions, when trying to figure out what is "right" in an increasingly complex world.
Sinclair skillfully presents a vivid picture of pre-war Europe -- where class served as the most important organizing principle of society. One did not socialize outside one's class, let alone contemplate marriage outside. Lower classes maintained deep respect for those they perceived as higher up. And through the unfolding story of the Budd family and their friends, Sinclair then looks at how World War I destroyed this structure, leaving countries open to new governments, social pressures, and political movements in the post-war era. That is QUITE a tall order, but honestly, Sinclair masters it!
NOTE: Known as a American muckraker (his popular novel, THE JUNGLE, was considered instrumental to the passage of both the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the 1919 Meat Inspection Act) and activist, understand going in that Sinclair approaches history with a liberal bias. Which means committed Capitalists don't necessarily come off very well in this novel.
World's End is a long book (750 pages)--- carrying us (as Lanny comes of age) through both the war and the lengthy peace process that followed in Paris, with President Woodrow Wilson, French Prime Minister George Clemenceau and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George leading the negotiations. Somehow, because of his position of privilege, Lanny always manages to be close to the key "dealmakers" who, in turn, expose him to the wide range of competing political viewpoints, economic imperatives, and desperate actions of the period.
I am truly in awe of the accomplishment of this book. And I WILL go on to read more Lanny Budd books.
WORLD'S END begins in 1914 when the central character of Lanny Budd is 14-- the son of a wealthy, American arms manufacturer, Robbie Budd, and a beautiful French woman who goes by the nickname Beauty. Though his parents don't live together, Lanny remains a child of privilege, growing up in Southern France amid cosmopolitan members of the elite class, who are themselves primarily focused on, travel, social activities and the arts.
Attending the best schools, Lanny is popular, excels at his studies, and forms close friendships with fellow students Rick (British) and Kurt (German), who later wind up on opposites sides of the coming World War. Fiercely loyal, honest, intelligent, and curious -- Lanny quickly becomes someone for us to both love and admire. Like me, you will no doubt identify with him, as I'm sure the author intended. Because Lanny, aside from being central to the story, also serves as the character who winds up asking the difficult questions and examining contradictions, when trying to figure out what is "right" in an increasingly complex world.
Sinclair skillfully presents a vivid picture of pre-war Europe -- where class served as the most important organizing principle of society. One did not socialize outside one's class, let alone contemplate marriage outside. Lower classes maintained deep respect for those they perceived as higher up. And through the unfolding story of the Budd family and their friends, Sinclair then looks at how World War I destroyed this structure, leaving countries open to new governments, social pressures, and political movements in the post-war era. That is QUITE a tall order, but honestly, Sinclair masters it!
NOTE: Known as a American muckraker (his popular novel, THE JUNGLE, was considered instrumental to the passage of both the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the 1919 Meat Inspection Act) and activist, understand going in that Sinclair approaches history with a liberal bias. Which means committed Capitalists don't necessarily come off very well in this novel.
World's End is a long book (750 pages)--- carrying us (as Lanny comes of age) through both the war and the lengthy peace process that followed in Paris, with President Woodrow Wilson, French Prime Minister George Clemenceau and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George leading the negotiations. Somehow, because of his position of privilege, Lanny always manages to be close to the key "dealmakers" who, in turn, expose him to the wide range of competing political viewpoints, economic imperatives, and desperate actions of the period.
I am truly in awe of the accomplishment of this book. And I WILL go on to read more Lanny Budd books.
atsumori's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
kansass's review against another edition
5.0
Habia leido La Jungla anteriormente de Upton Sinclair, y aunque es magnifico, no tiene nada que ver con esta serie de Lanny Budd. El fin del Mundo es casi un libro de aventuras, de esos que no puedes dejar de leer, que estás deseando retomarlo estés donde estés, una historia vital y entretenidísima y Lanny es un personaje maravilloso. Muy invisible en nuestro país Upton Sinclair, quizás por lo que decía más arriba y la gente se piense que se puede parecer a La Jungla, que es casi la obra más conocida de Sinclair, y sin embargo, estoy segura de que cualquier acercamiento del lector a Lanny Budd ya es para siempre. Gracias a Hoja de Lata por darle visibilidad, aunque necesita ser todavía más conocido!!
jcoughlin24's review against another edition
4.0
Well worth it!
I had a teacher in high school who taught us about the Russian Revolution and WWI using the book Nicholas and Alexandra. It was a great teaching tool and got me hooked. This book does a similar service. The story follows Lanny from ages 13 through 19. Through his experiences, I learned a lot more about WWI, the Russian Revolution and the following "peace" treaty. I'm not talking about just facts. I learned about cause and effect, of the events of the time period. Decisions that still have ramifications today.
I had a teacher in high school who taught us about the Russian Revolution and WWI using the book Nicholas and Alexandra. It was a great teaching tool and got me hooked. This book does a similar service. The story follows Lanny from ages 13 through 19. Through his experiences, I learned a lot more about WWI, the Russian Revolution and the following "peace" treaty. I'm not talking about just facts. I learned about cause and effect, of the events of the time period. Decisions that still have ramifications today.
geoffreyjen's review against another edition
5.0
I read most of the Lanny Budd series as a young man and thought they were extraordinary. They have been more or less out of print for decades, and then available through a small indie publisher, but they have just been re-issued in ebook format - I bought the whole collection (11 books). Just finished rereading thefirst one, called [b:World's End|204390|World's End|Upton Sinclair|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347542920s/204390.jpg|197780]. I like it as much, if not more, than back then. A fantastic look situation surrounding the first World War in France, the Peace Conference and the development of the infamous Treaty of Versailles, as well as a coming of age story. Wonderful. On to the next one!
tctimlin's review against another edition
3.0
I found this slow going. I didn’t particularly care for the hero, precocious young Lanny Budd, being raised in Europe by his beautiful, fortune-seeking mother, with occasional visits from his American arms dealing father. The story is set just as WWI is breaking out and ends abruptly after the Battle of the Marne. Nothing much happens and Lanny and his parents are all pretty insufferable.
msand3's review against another edition
4.0
I have yet to be disappointed by a novel from Upton Sinclair, whose work spans the first six decades of the early 20th century. By the time he began this Lanny Budd novel in 1940 -- the first of an eventual eleven-novel series totaling over 7,000 pages that would chronicle Lanny’s life between 1913 and 1950 -- Sinclair was among a handful of major socialist novelists remaining in the United States.
World’s End lacks the fire and sense of immediacy of Sinclair’s early work -- [b:The Jungle|41681|The Jungle|Upton Sinclair|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1332140681l/41681._SY75_.jpg|1253187], [b:King Coal|204391|King Coal|Upton Sinclair|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347328757l/204391._SX50_.jpg|197781], [b:Oil!|54847|Oil!|Upton Sinclair|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388293109l/54847._SY75_.jpg|3001768], etc. -- but that’s because its goal is not to engage in muckraking a current social ill, but to trace the course of America’s rise to industrial power in the early 20th century. Lanny (born in 1900) is obviously a character symbolic of the U.S. industrial class as it comes of age between two world wars. We see his early education among the privileged in Europe, as he doesn’t even set foot in the U.S. until he is 17. There is a section where he discovers the infamous slums of East London (which is clearly a nod to socialist classics like Jack London’s [b:The People of the Abyss|113250|The People of the Abyss|Jack London|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349063625l/113250._SX50_.jpg|1036883] and Orwell’s [b:The Road to Wigan Pier|30553|The Road to Wigan Pier|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414451091l/30553._SY75_.jpg|1034643]) and is first introduced to the aims of socialism that are so antithetical to his family’s war profiteering empire, emphasizing that Lanny’s story is a microcosm of the U.S. at the turn-of-the-century.
The grandson of a munitions baron, Lanny learns that the impending war has more to do with capitalism than democracy: money, oil, and post-war power. His American family (i.e., the U.S.) sells weapons to any buyer. Since the U.K. and France have more money than Germany, the U.S. sells weapons to them (while remaining “neutral” *ahem*), but ultimately joins the war, naturally allying with the countries who buy the most weapons, and who put the U.S. in the best position to have access to oil in the post-war division of spoils. Sinclair is writing in 1940, so he makes very clear the link between capitalism and fascism that would come to a head in Spain and Germany in the 1930s, the seeds of which were sown in the First World War. Lanny’s grandfather, despite manufacturing and selling the arms that will kill millions, preaches fundamental Christian dogma and leads the local Bible study on his days off from negotiating weapons contracts with warring nations. (As P.F. Sloan would write 25 years later of American cultural values: “Hate your next door neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace…”)
The novel is unique from other American WWI novels (Cather’s [b:One of Ours|543137|One of Ours|Willa Cather|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349072170l/543137._SY75_.jpg|2205446], Dos Passos’ [b:Three Soldiers|7105|Three Soldiers|John Dos Passos|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1165606453l/7105._SY75_.jpg|1245376], Trumbo’s [b:Johnny Got His Gun|51606|Johnny Got His Gun|Dalton Trumbo|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386925458l/51606._SY75_.jpg|180461], etc.) in that the action moves WEST across the Atlantic: it begins in Europe and only then transitions to the U.S. when the war begins. Sinclair is offering the perspective not of the working poor who are tricked into joining the war for the illusory ideal of “making the world safe for democracy,” but of the upper classes who fund the war and make the profits, all from the security of their mansions. As the heir of a wealthy industrialist family, Lanny has the opposite experience of poor American working class men who are raised in the States before being shipped off as canon fodder in Europe: he lives a life of privilege in France, only to flee to the safety of Connecticut while America enters the war. Only after the war does Lanny return as a secretary to a member of Wilson’s delegation as The Big Three attempt to remake the world -- leading to the complications that would not be straightened out until the Second World War.
It is this second half of the book that is the most fascinating, as Sinclair charts both Lanny’s gradual drift to socialism and the political machinations that would continue to play out on the world stage through the Cold War and beyond. The U.S. and France both attempt to deal with Germany in their own way (feeling sympathy and punishing, respectively), while hypocritically advocating for post-war “self determination” while simultaneously ruling over world empires along with the U.K. The scene is set for Lanny’s young adulthood, America’s rapid ascendency in the world, and eventually the rise of fascism in Europe before WWII.
I look forward to following Budd’s journey in the next ten books of the series. Each one is 600-800 pages long, and Sinclair intended these to be one massive 7,000+ page novel, so I imagine it will take me a few years to get through. It’s easy to see why this would lead Sinclair to receive the Pulitzer for the third novel in the series, [b:Dragon's Teeth|39078166|Dragon's Teeth (World's End Lanny Budd, #3)|Upton Sinclair|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1520471454l/39078166._SY75_.jpg|16805421], in 1942.
World’s End lacks the fire and sense of immediacy of Sinclair’s early work -- [b:The Jungle|41681|The Jungle|Upton Sinclair|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1332140681l/41681._SY75_.jpg|1253187], [b:King Coal|204391|King Coal|Upton Sinclair|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347328757l/204391._SX50_.jpg|197781], [b:Oil!|54847|Oil!|Upton Sinclair|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388293109l/54847._SY75_.jpg|3001768], etc. -- but that’s because its goal is not to engage in muckraking a current social ill, but to trace the course of America’s rise to industrial power in the early 20th century. Lanny (born in 1900) is obviously a character symbolic of the U.S. industrial class as it comes of age between two world wars. We see his early education among the privileged in Europe, as he doesn’t even set foot in the U.S. until he is 17. There is a section where he discovers the infamous slums of East London (which is clearly a nod to socialist classics like Jack London’s [b:The People of the Abyss|113250|The People of the Abyss|Jack London|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349063625l/113250._SX50_.jpg|1036883] and Orwell’s [b:The Road to Wigan Pier|30553|The Road to Wigan Pier|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414451091l/30553._SY75_.jpg|1034643]) and is first introduced to the aims of socialism that are so antithetical to his family’s war profiteering empire, emphasizing that Lanny’s story is a microcosm of the U.S. at the turn-of-the-century.
The grandson of a munitions baron, Lanny learns that the impending war has more to do with capitalism than democracy: money, oil, and post-war power. His American family (i.e., the U.S.) sells weapons to any buyer. Since the U.K. and France have more money than Germany, the U.S. sells weapons to them (while remaining “neutral” *ahem*), but ultimately joins the war, naturally allying with the countries who buy the most weapons, and who put the U.S. in the best position to have access to oil in the post-war division of spoils. Sinclair is writing in 1940, so he makes very clear the link between capitalism and fascism that would come to a head in Spain and Germany in the 1930s, the seeds of which were sown in the First World War. Lanny’s grandfather, despite manufacturing and selling the arms that will kill millions, preaches fundamental Christian dogma and leads the local Bible study on his days off from negotiating weapons contracts with warring nations. (As P.F. Sloan would write 25 years later of American cultural values: “Hate your next door neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace…”)
The novel is unique from other American WWI novels (Cather’s [b:One of Ours|543137|One of Ours|Willa Cather|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349072170l/543137._SY75_.jpg|2205446], Dos Passos’ [b:Three Soldiers|7105|Three Soldiers|John Dos Passos|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1165606453l/7105._SY75_.jpg|1245376], Trumbo’s [b:Johnny Got His Gun|51606|Johnny Got His Gun|Dalton Trumbo|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386925458l/51606._SY75_.jpg|180461], etc.) in that the action moves WEST across the Atlantic: it begins in Europe and only then transitions to the U.S. when the war begins. Sinclair is offering the perspective not of the working poor who are tricked into joining the war for the illusory ideal of “making the world safe for democracy,” but of the upper classes who fund the war and make the profits, all from the security of their mansions. As the heir of a wealthy industrialist family, Lanny has the opposite experience of poor American working class men who are raised in the States before being shipped off as canon fodder in Europe: he lives a life of privilege in France, only to flee to the safety of Connecticut while America enters the war. Only after the war does Lanny return as a secretary to a member of Wilson’s delegation as The Big Three attempt to remake the world -- leading to the complications that would not be straightened out until the Second World War.
It is this second half of the book that is the most fascinating, as Sinclair charts both Lanny’s gradual drift to socialism and the political machinations that would continue to play out on the world stage through the Cold War and beyond. The U.S. and France both attempt to deal with Germany in their own way (feeling sympathy and punishing, respectively), while hypocritically advocating for post-war “self determination” while simultaneously ruling over world empires along with the U.K. The scene is set for Lanny’s young adulthood, America’s rapid ascendency in the world, and eventually the rise of fascism in Europe before WWII.
I look forward to following Budd’s journey in the next ten books of the series. Each one is 600-800 pages long, and Sinclair intended these to be one massive 7,000+ page novel, so I imagine it will take me a few years to get through. It’s easy to see why this would lead Sinclair to receive the Pulitzer for the third novel in the series, [b:Dragon's Teeth|39078166|Dragon's Teeth (World's End Lanny Budd, #3)|Upton Sinclair|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1520471454l/39078166._SY75_.jpg|16805421], in 1942.
clockless's review against another edition
4.0
A decent book overall, significantly better than The Jungle, probably because it successfully focuses on a single character. Sinclair writes with the benefit of a lot of hindsight, yet still manages to insert a lot of confused, borderline conspiratorial ideas into the work, much to the detriment of the story and whatever historical value it would have. The characters are the book's strongest point; Sinclair's willingness to talk more openly about the things his contemporaries shied away from or talked around gives the story a lot of credibility. As with The Jungle, if he weren't so focused on making sure the reader walked away with the right opinions, he would be capable of writing a great novel. Perhaps he did, but it isn't this one.