Scan barcode
boomgrrrl's reviews
268 reviews
The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition by Upton Sinclair
3.0
I finished The Jungle. I still don't really know how I felt about it. When I started it, I was all pumped. It's been on my list forever, so it was one of those, "Okay, I'm finally going to do this!"
The Jungle starts out with this family from Lithuania moving to America for a better life. They move into Chicago. When they get here, there's so many cultural differences that they have to get used to, so many things about living, buying a house, general daily functioning. The struggle for them was described well in my opinion. Showed how raw things are in this country regarding getting jobs, etc. It gets really graphic and raw in the first part of the book where it discusses the slaughterhouses. I considered stopping reading it at that point and becoming a vegan, just right away. But, I kept reading. There are not a lot of things that gross me out, but Sinclair described things in a way that I feel is going to stick with me for quite some time. The conditions of the factories, the descriptions of how the machines work and how they actually slaughter the animals is disgustingly heartbreaking from both perspectives--the animals and the humans.
The parts about the family struggles, how they got through things with all the new things they encountered was interesting to me. However, I think Sinclair did a nice job at portraying how difficult it actually is to "make it." They needed a car, but they couldn't afford it, so they walked in the snow, sometimes barely surviving in the dead of winter.
When it shifted into all the political commentary, I had a really hard time following everything and got really bored. I caught bits and pieces, but at this point, I was so far into the book that I just needed to finish it. So, there were still some snippets that were interesting, but there were a lot that were very tedious to get through.
I guess I will say that Sinclair did a decent job at making you feel like you were right there with the characters and going through their struggles with them. I like books like that where you can become a ghost or an imaginary person in the pages of a book right along with the characters and really feel what they are experiencing. I'm glad that I read it, but it's not something that I'd be excited to read over again.
The Jungle starts out with this family from Lithuania moving to America for a better life. They move into Chicago. When they get here, there's so many cultural differences that they have to get used to, so many things about living, buying a house, general daily functioning. The struggle for them was described well in my opinion. Showed how raw things are in this country regarding getting jobs, etc. It gets really graphic and raw in the first part of the book where it discusses the slaughterhouses. I considered stopping reading it at that point and becoming a vegan, just right away. But, I kept reading. There are not a lot of things that gross me out, but Sinclair described things in a way that I feel is going to stick with me for quite some time. The conditions of the factories, the descriptions of how the machines work and how they actually slaughter the animals is disgustingly heartbreaking from both perspectives--the animals and the humans.
The parts about the family struggles, how they got through things with all the new things they encountered was interesting to me. However, I think Sinclair did a nice job at portraying how difficult it actually is to "make it." They needed a car, but they couldn't afford it, so they walked in the snow, sometimes barely surviving in the dead of winter.
When it shifted into all the political commentary, I had a really hard time following everything and got really bored. I caught bits and pieces, but at this point, I was so far into the book that I just needed to finish it. So, there were still some snippets that were interesting, but there were a lot that were very tedious to get through.
I guess I will say that Sinclair did a decent job at making you feel like you were right there with the characters and going through their struggles with them. I like books like that where you can become a ghost or an imaginary person in the pages of a book right along with the characters and really feel what they are experiencing. I'm glad that I read it, but it's not something that I'd be excited to read over again.