As I opened the cover of The Jungle, I anticipated reading a tragic story about the cruelness inflicted upon a poor, working-class family. I had read an excerpt from the novel and had conversed with people who had read it; I thought the story was going to be solid, and perhaps even entertaining. I was incredibly wrong. The beginning of the story started out slow, as it was just another “American Dream” type story. Jurgis …showed first 75 words of 325 total…

…showed last 75 words of 325 total…The story, at that point, needed to concentrate more on the reunited family of Jurgis rather than the radical ideas circulating throughout Chicago. Upton Sinclair painted an accurate historical picture with The Jungle, but he wrote it without a sensible plot, with redundant and ambiguous details, and with no appeal as a readable story. I recommend leaving this book on the shelf for someone else to stumble through; I was not impressed. crzyninja7@aol.com