What one reviewer at amazon said about Jungle:
If you are considering reading this book: 1) Read it! 2) Read the novel, then the excellent introduction (I've never read an introduction I liked so well.) I recommend you read this book not because it is such an incredible piece of literature but because of it's importance when it came out. The novel's central story is what happens to an immigrant family working in the Chicago stockyards in the early 1900s. Some reviewers have blasted the book's pro-Socialism, anti-capitalism slant. I think that is a bit silly; the last few pages are somewhat of a Socialist manifesto, but it doesn't interfere with the rest of the novel being an interesting read. While every conceivable bad thing happens to the protagonist, and while such occurrences may seem outlandish and unlikely, it is still important for us to consider that they could have happened; it is still important for us to consider how such calamities and uneducated choices can shape our lives. When the book was published, public attention focused not on the plight of the immigrant protagonist, but on the conditions in the packing plants and slaughterhouses. Sinclair meticulously researched this part of the book, and all his claims were supported but one (that of a man ending up in a bucket of lard). I have been to present day slaughterhouses and packing plants, and I know that conditions today are sanitary and humane for the most part. However, the book gave me an appreciation that this was not always the case. As you read the novel, consider your reaction if you had been reading it when it was first published; consider also the choices you would have made as the immigrant protagonist.
Begins:
It was four o'clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive. There had been a crowd following all the way, owing to the exuberance of Marija Berczynskas. The occasion rested heavily upon Marija's broad shoulders--it was her task to see that all things went in due form, and after the best home traditions; and, flying wildly hither and thither, bowling every one out of the way, and scolding and exhorting all day with her tremendous voice, Marija was too eager to see that others conformed to the proprieties to consider them herself. She had left the church last of all, and, desiring to arrive first at the hall, had issued orders to the coachman to drive faster. When that personage had developed a will of his own in the matter, Marija had flung up the window of the carriage, and, leaning out, proceeded to tell him her opinion of him, first in Lithuanian, which he did not understand, and then in Polish, which he did. Having the advantage of her in altitude, the driver had stood his ground and even ventured to attempt to speak; and the result had been a furious altercation, which, continuing all the way down Ashland Avenue, had added a new swarm of urchins to the cortege at each side street for half a mile.
This was unfortunate, for already there was a throng before the door. The music had started up, and half a block away you could hear the dull "broom, broom" of a cello, with the squeaking of two fiddles which vied with each other in intricate and altitudinous gymnastics. Seeing the throng, Marija abandoned precipitately the debate concerning the ancestors of her coachman, and, springing from the moving carriage, plunged in and proceeded to clear a way to the hall. Once within, she turned and began to push the other way, roaring, meantime, "Eik! Eik! Uzdaryk-duris!" in tones which made the orchestral uproar sound like fairy music.
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