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davidwright's review
4.0
I’ve enjoyed several other hobo accounts (such as Jim Tully's great Beggars of Life), and don’t know how this had escaped my notice for so long, but I enjoyed it so much I think it may kick off a Jack London binge for me. In these real-life adventures drawn from his tramping days during the depression years of the 1890s, London shares with the reader the fine art of lying and begging for food, the vicious skill of holding one’s own amidst the rough handling of wolfish road kids and predatory professional hobos, and the colorful language and customs of life [b:on the road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21E8H3D1JSL._SL75_.jpg|3355573]. Throughout, London depicts himself as a romantic adventurer and protean trickster, but there is another journey underway here as well. He records a lesser-known historical chapter in which he joined an army of jobless tramps in a march on Washington D.C. to demand of a sort of proto-Public Works Administration – an experience that clearly had a big influence on London’s own Socialist views. London comes of age, maturing from a wayward adventure-seeker continually on-the-make and looking out only for his own interests to someone with a wider view of the world’s unfortunates and a social conscience. These views are reinforced by London’s experiences behind bars in a powerful passage that pre-figures Alexander Berkman’s great Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. I hugely enjoyed this account, as I suspected I would when I chose this title to be the first full-length work to read on my Sony Reader. Not bad, and now I have several other London works in the public domain downloaded, including The Star Rover, which a number of ex-cons have recommended to me over the years.
abarone121's review
3.0
I had to read this one for my Road Trips class. Although I definitely loved London's distinct voice and thought it was a great read over all, it just wasn't my kind of book.
aseleener's review against another edition
3.0
I read this on Serial Reader, 18 issues. It was interesting. It's a memoir by author Jack London telling about his life as a hobo. I can't imagine anybody wanting to live like that! He stows away on trains, begs for food, runs from police, all just for the fun of it. The jargon got to be a bit much after a while. But it was an interesting nonfiction read.
katrinavg's review against another edition
3.0
The Road is a collection of short stories that focuses on Jack London's tramp life, and the stories he wrote about tramps. In this book there are 14 short stories. The one I liked best by far was "Local Color", which had me howling with laughter. Some of the other ones were interesting, and a few of them were absolutely completely boring. However! They did serve me a practical use. A few months ago I was going through a period of insomnia, and I would literally read the boring stories from this book to fall asleep. It worked.
Overall, London has a very unique and vivid way of writing. It's more the topics that he's writing about that sometimes fall flat.
Overall, London has a very unique and vivid way of writing. It's more the topics that he's writing about that sometimes fall flat.
msand3's review
4.0
Fifty years before Kerouac, Jack London published a memoir about his life “on The Road.” In this case, The Road was the railroad, as London describes his years as a hobo riding the rails across the country. The essays are rather loosely connected, arranged by topic rather than chronologically. Indeed, only toward the end does London delve into how he began his life as a hobo after his teenage years as an infamous oyster pirate in San Francisco. (And you think THAT’S weird? Just wait until you read [b:John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs|288301|John Barleycorn Alcoholic Memoirs|Jack London|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356889870l/288301._SY75_.jpg|2059278] or hear about his time in Asia!)
But back to this book: the highlights are London’s encounters with the justice system -- being beaten by cops (“bulls”) for no reason other than being a poor guy walking down the street, the farcical “trial” that hobos must face, and the time he spent in prison. London portrays the graft and social caste of the prison as a mirror of the American capitalist system. Like businessmen or government officials, the prisoners barter, take bribes, abuse their authority, form trusts (of a sort), run underground black markets, and form communication syndicates.
When he’s not in prison, London is immersed in the subculture of the tramps: their communal bond, their slang, their sharing of resources, their survival skills, and most importantly, their stories. London states that he refines his storytelling craft by not only listening to and engaging with his fellow hobos in telling their stories “on The Road,” but also by spinning elaborate narratives to secure food/housing from sympathetic people or to evade being locked up by the police. As with the other London memoirs I’ve read, it is fascinating, beautifully written, thought-provoking, and entirely male-centric. London’s language is both wonderfully archaic, but also surprisingly modern. He sounds at times like he’s writing in 2007 rather than 1907.
Recommended for those interested in American history/culture, adventure narratives, or even the roots of the later mid-twentieth-century Beat ethos. To be read alongside the fictional accounts [b:Sister of The Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha|680141|Sister of The Road The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha - as told to Dr. Ben Reitman|Ben L. Reitman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328696807l/680141._SY75_.jpg|666540] by Ben Reitman and [b:On the Road|70401|On the Road|Jack Kerouac|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413588576l/70401._SX50_.jpg|1701188] by Kerouac.
But back to this book: the highlights are London’s encounters with the justice system -- being beaten by cops (“bulls”) for no reason other than being a poor guy walking down the street, the farcical “trial” that hobos must face, and the time he spent in prison. London portrays the graft and social caste of the prison as a mirror of the American capitalist system. Like businessmen or government officials, the prisoners barter, take bribes, abuse their authority, form trusts (of a sort), run underground black markets, and form communication syndicates.
When he’s not in prison, London is immersed in the subculture of the tramps: their communal bond, their slang, their sharing of resources, their survival skills, and most importantly, their stories. London states that he refines his storytelling craft by not only listening to and engaging with his fellow hobos in telling their stories “on The Road,” but also by spinning elaborate narratives to secure food/housing from sympathetic people or to evade being locked up by the police. As with the other London memoirs I’ve read, it is fascinating, beautifully written, thought-provoking, and entirely male-centric. London’s language is both wonderfully archaic, but also surprisingly modern. He sounds at times like he’s writing in 2007 rather than 1907.
Recommended for those interested in American history/culture, adventure narratives, or even the roots of the later mid-twentieth-century Beat ethos. To be read alongside the fictional accounts [b:Sister of The Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha|680141|Sister of The Road The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha - as told to Dr. Ben Reitman|Ben L. Reitman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328696807l/680141._SY75_.jpg|666540] by Ben Reitman and [b:On the Road|70401|On the Road|Jack Kerouac|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413588576l/70401._SX50_.jpg|1701188] by Kerouac.