About book The Call Of The Wild And Selected Stories (100th Anniversary) (2003)
Up until now I'd had only two experiences with Jack London: that time Data met him in Star Trek and random, loving quotes from Parks & Recreation. Thus I was quite surprised when this, the first of his writing I've ever read, turned out to be neither incomprehensibly anachronistic or unbearably hokey.In fact, The Call of the Wild is very readable and enjoyable. It tilts a bit towards the hokey every now and then, admittedly, but London's genuine knowledge of northern environs and the bleak possibilities therein keep one's eyes from rolling most of the time. As to the dated-ness of the writing-- well, there are some problems there.Mostly, London's treatment of First Nations peoples is unfourtunate. I'd wager it was relatively positive for its time, given how other authors would have written, but it's often cringe inducing to modern eyes. It may be that London has first-hand knowledge of some of the tribes of which he writes or maybe not, but in either case I found their usage troubling. In particular their use in The Call of the Wild borders on making them cartoonish western film villains. The other stories in this volume are more or less the same, perhaps worse. Any time one picks up a book, a "classic", from an earlier time one can expect racist depictions and concepts--and of course, and sadly, this isn't limited to books of the past. Here there was never enough time for it to turn me off the story, but I wouldn't blame someone for avoiding this on these grounds.The best story in the collection is its namesake, The Call of the Wild. Enthralling and saddening, always thoughtful, the title piece will keep you plugging along even as the setting, characters, and tone change drastically within a few pages. As I hinted at above, the ending gets a little hokey, but it's rather like JAWS: if it had you until then, it'll have you for the last five minutes. Similarly like JAWS, there's a lot of working class hero bullshit up in this, if one pegs the hard-journeying northern prospectors and government workers as working class. To be fair, London is quick to point out the flaws and untimely realities of the lifestyle and its people, but his otherwise loving depictions are often a little thick. Still, even while flirting with worship his passages ring with truth and the experience of a careful observer. You can't say London was bad at what he did.The rest of stories are much less engrossing. They aren't horrible but they don't have the time to develop much of a connection or the punch to live up to the opening salvo. There is the possible exception of Diable-- A Dog, which had a nasty enough spirit to follow up The Call of the Wild. Otherwise I dragged my feet through the last half of the book. There's good writing there but it's often more of the same and without Buck's charismatic narrative to lead us.So, three stars. Very glad to have picked it up, and I hope to read more soon.
The book I read is The Call Of The Wild, by Jack London. This book is about a dog named Buck who gets taken away by Manuel, one of the garden helpers. Manuel took buck away to sell him as a sled dog, which were in high demand during the Klondike, which is the setting of the story. He stayed on a train for two days without food or water before getting shipped by van to a man known as the man in the red sweater. Buck tried to attack him and was beaten. Buck was soon bought by two French-Canadians named Perrault and François and became part of a sled-dog team. The team was like a pack of wild animals, where Buck started at the lowest position on the team. Over time, Buck rose up to the leader of the team after killing Spitz, another dog who used to be the head of the team. Then, Buck was then traded over to another team. The owners, Hal, Charles, and Mercedes, did not work well together and didn’t know how to properly run a sled dog team. They ran out of food and soon, Buck was rescued by a man named John Thornton. The two grew close together and Buck would never leave John Thornton’s side. Soon, Buck began to leave and go into the woods. One day in his visit, he met a wolf and followed him for a while, until Buck remembered about his owner. He headed back to find that John Thornton was dead. Buck took his revenge out on the Indians that had killed Jon Thornton and lived with the wolf pack that the wolf that he met earlier belonged to.I liked the book a lot. It was well written and the story was very easy to follow. Although, there were a lot of words that hadn’t seen and didn’t know their definitions. The descriptions of characters and the events were clear and you could really understand each character and why they acted how they did. Also, even though it was a short book, it felt complete and that it wasn’t missing anything. Anyone who enjoys a good adventure story full of action and a good flowing story should read this book.I would give this book a 4 out of 5. I would rate this book the way I did because it was a really good book overall but, some of the words were hard to understand and sometimes, the events didn’t make sense at first, but, it would make sense when you read on. I really liked the story and how the author executed the plot.
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In 1962 my mother arranged to travel by the HMS Milora, a freighter, from Duluth/Superior at the western tip of Lake Superior to Bremenhaven, Germany with me and my little brother, Fin. The trip through the Great Lakes, the Saint Lawrence Seaway and the Atlantic took weeks as we collected grain en route and were held up off Germany by a dock strike. It was wonderful. I saw icebergs, whales, porpoises, flying fish, luminescent planktons, mid-sea oil rigs and nightly adult movies in incomprehensible languages presented to the Norwegian crew, all of whom were very nice to the two little boys aboard.On the trip I did a lot of drawing and a lot of reading when not being shown around by the captain, the chief engineer or any number of crewmen. One of the more outstanding books was Jack London's Call of the Wild, a novel collected with a number of short stories also involving the northlands, dogs and wolves. Having known dogs well since infancy, first my grandmother's Peter, then my own Jimmy Olsen, and having spent every summer in the relatively tame woodlands of SW Michigan, I related well to London's evocation of nature and his characterizations of canines. Already I generally preferred dogs to humans, they being simpler and more natural in their social interactions. His descriptions of people abusing such natively friendly creatures evoked anger and, sometimes, tears.
—Erik Graff
"The Call of the Wild" would itself have been worth the price I paid for this. The tale is written in such a way as to break the reader's heart time and time again, only to force a rekindling of instinct before regrouping. It's what's needed for survival in the north. Buck is put through a terrible ordeal, and his occasional rewards are nothing short of glorious. This story is ultimately about triumph - not to echo Riefenstahl, but the triumph of the will. "Call" is about the supreme beauty of realizing the latent vitality of one's ancestral instincts to make the present all the more powerful. That it's told with such agonizing beauty is the talent of Jack London."Call" is the centerfold, but there are other stories here. "Diable," "Odyssey," "To the Man on Trail," "To Build a Fire," and "Love of Life" are all, in many ways, much less sentimental than "Call." These stories are not about triumph, but about nature in general. Some are focused on what it takes to survive in it, and some are about it purely as a destructive force. Life can so easily be smothered by the great white silence, and London's depiction is dark, grim, brutal, and yet awe-inspiring. This collection is the result of a magnificent literary mind under the direction of such philosophies as those of Herbert Spencer and Ragnar Redbeard.The foreword is written to make the reader believe London lived his life to the fullest, and I don't doubt it. It serves as an excellent introduction to the beautiful fiction. The afterword serves as a fun impromptu philosophical discussion of the stories, and worth reading right after finishing this collection.
—Grigori Cross
Another classic that I had never read. A collection of 6 stories by London, all set in the very cold Canadian north. The Call of the wild was by far the best, but they were all enjoyable. To Build A Fire was the second best story in this collection in my opinion.The stories were at least an enjoyable read, and most of them were excellent. The only thing I did wrong was read this book in the winter. When you are already cold, it's not a lot of fun reading about people getting frostbite and freezing to death.
—Mike
