Call of the Wild review

This is a story about a dog named Buck who lives on a beautiful estate in California, but is sold off as a sled dog.

After being badly beaten by a dog trainer, Buck is used to pull mail in the Arctic. Although the work is tough, he learns quickly and soon takes over the sled team by killing the previous leader.

The dog team is sold off to different sled drivers and nearly worked to death. They are in need of rest, but because of mismanagement, the strength of the dogs gets drained out of them until they are killed off one by one. Fortunately, Buck is saved by a man named John Thornton, a kind man with a heart for animals.

John takes in Buck and helps him recover. Buck, having been mistreated by others in the past, is apprehensive at first, but then grows to love John. In fact, Buck pulls a 1,000 pound sled to win John a bet.

John takes Buck and the rest of his dogs into the back country, searching for a mythical Lost Cabin. During this search, Buck wanders into the forest by himself and meets a wild wolf, which sparks a primal instinct within him.

One night, after returning from the forest, Buck sees that John has been killed by a group of local Indians.

In the end, with nowhere else to go, Buck integrates into the local wolf pack, becoming a part of local Indian mythology.

First, this story discusses the relationship between domestic and primal instincts. Buck is introduced as a soft dog, living a luxurious life on the grounds of a mansion. But when he is taken and placed in the wild with other dogs, something within him changes. Yet, these changes are not foreign to him. It's like these instincts are already a part of him, just unearthed.

And what makes this more relatable to readers, who do not necessary experience that call of the wild in our highly modernized society, is how these primal instincts may have more to do with morality than grunts and cavemen drawings.

The story suggests that often to survive, moral nature must die. As Buck tries to assimilate to his new outdoor lifestyle, he is timid and almost polite, to the point where the other dogs eat his food. However, he soon learns to steal food to survive. In fact, he learns that it is easier to steal than not to steal.

But why would readers enjoy a story about non-talking dogs? It's because of the applicability of the story to humans through the style of writing. As written, readers are placed in the head of dog, trying to understand the sled dog culture.

And as the story goes on, readers discover how humanized Buck's personality is. Buck is relatable as a character. Any person who has worked in a job that they did not necessarily want can understand the struggles Buck goes through in this story. It's a frustration derived by helplessness, anger, and fear, all human emotions, yet felt by a dog and projected to a level of relatability.

Through Minute Book Reports, hopefully you can get the plot and a few relevant discussion points in just a couple of minutes.

FULL AudioBook

Quotes

• "An eye for an eye - and the whole world go blind soon."
• "Better I brightest meteor than eternal, but the sleepy planet ..."
• "Life always gives a person less than he demands from her."
• "One should not see itself in its true form, then life becomes unbearable."
• "Let me see the truth in the face. Tell me, what face the truth. "
• "WOMAN - is a failed man."
• "To invent the mortal sins, he needed someone with his imagination and his power over matter."
• "Everything is perfectly fine as long as you do not possess them."
• "A person should not be selfish, but he will remain so when the social system based on the undisguised disgusting"
• "Bone, abandoned dogs, not a charity; charity - is bone, divided by the dog when you are hungry is not less than it. "
• "Beauty - absolute. Human life, whole life submits beauty. Beauty has already existed in the universe to man. Beauty remains in the universe, when a man dies, but not vice versa. Beauty does not depend on a tiny man floundering in the mud. "
• "For me there is something attractive in a drunken man, and if I was at the head of any educational institution, I would certainly have established a chair studying psychology drunks, with optional practical training. This would give more than any books and the laboratory. "
• The fact is, to be truthful, to copy the fiction. "
• "I just get shy when I see his human limitations, which prevents me to cover all aspects of the problem, especially when it comes to fundamental issues of life."
• "Whether it happens that two silent soul, so different, so come to each other? Of course, we often feel the same way, but even when we feel something different, we still understand each other, even though we have a common language. We do not need the words spoken aloud. We are for this are unintelligible. "

Interesting facts from the life of Jack London

• At the end of 1875 a scandal erupted in the United States: the American press excitedly telling us about the unfortunate Flora Wellman, who tried to shoot himself in a fit of despair after a famous astrologer, Professor William Cheney, with whom she lived, learning about the pregnancy Flora insisted on an abortion. All, however, ended up rather well: the name of Cheney was dishonored for life, and Wellman received only slightly injured, and January 12, 1876 gave birth to San Francisco boy, who gave the name John. John Griffith Chaney, also known as Jack London.

• Two women in the childhood Jack London became important for him to end his days. First - Virginia Prentiss, a former slave Flora Wellmann; in her care after the birth mother left him for a while. Second - Eliza London, the eldest daughter of Jack's stepfather John London, whom Flora was married at the end of 1876; loyal friend and guardian angel of the writer. Alas, she constantly bore Flora get rich quick plans and these adventures smashed all attempts to farm her husband during the severe economic crisis.

• Working life of Jack London began early: Seller morning and evening newspapers, the boy in a bowling alley, a cleaner in the park, working the canning factory. Then began the maritime adventure. Good boy Virginia lent $ 300, which was bought second-hand schooner, and soon 14-year-old "captain" called "Prince of the oyster pirates" for illegal fishing of shrimp and crabs in San Francisco's waterfront. Then there was the service in the fishing patrol and swimming sailor on a fishing schooner "Sophie Sutherland" in Japan and the Bering Sea.
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Jack London's books

Jack London's life in pictures

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Martin Eden

Martin Eden is a 1909 novel by American author Jack London about a young proletarian autodidact struggling to become a writer. It was first serialized in The Pacific Monthly magazine from September 1908 to September 1909 and published in book form by Macmillan in September 1909.

Eden represents writers' frustration with publishers by speculating that when he mails off a manuscript, a "cunning arrangement of cogs" immediately puts it in a new envelope and returns it automatically with a rejection slip. [Citation needed] The central theme of Eden's developing artistic sensibilities places the novel in the tradition of the Künstlerroman, in which is narrated the formation and development of an artist.

Eden differs from London in that Eden rejects socialism, attacking it as "slave morality", and relies on a Nietzschean individualism. In a note to Upton Sinclair, London wrote, "One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero). I must have bungled, for not a single reviewer has discovered it.

• Plot summary

Living in Oakland at the beginning of the 20th century, Martin Eden struggles to rise above his destitute, proletarian circumstances through an intense and passionate pursuit of self-education, hoping to achieve a place among the literary elite. His principal motivation is his love for Ruth Morse. Because Eden is a rough, uneducated sailor from a working-class batskґround and the Morses are a bourgeois family, a union between them would be impossible unless and until he reached their level of wealth and refinement.

Over a period of two years, Eden promises Ruth that success will come, but just before it does, Ruth loses her patience and rejects him in a letter, saying, "if only you had settled down ... and attempted to make something of yourself ". By the time Eden attains the favour of the publishers and the bourgeoisie who had shunned him, he has already developed a grudge against them and become jaded by toil and unrequited love. Instead of enjoying his success, he retreats into a quiet indifference, interrupted only to rail mentally against the genteelness of bourgeois society or to donate his new wealth to working-class friends and family. He felt that people did not value him for himself or for his work but only for his fame.

The novel ends with Eden's committing suicide by drowning, which contributed to what researcher Clarice Stasz calls the "biographical myth" that Jack London's own death was a suicide.


London's oldest daughter Joan commented that in spite of its tragic ending, the book is often regarded as "a 'success' story ... which inspired not only a whole generation of young writers but other different fields who, without aid or encouragement, attained their objectives through great struggle ".

Popular works

1. A Daughter of the Snows (1902)
2. The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902)
3. The Call of the Wild (1903)
4. The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903)
5. The Sea-Wolf (1904)
6. The Game (1905)
7. White Fang (1906)
8. Before Adam (1907)
9. The Iron Heel (1908)
10. Martin Eden (1909)
11. Burning Daylight (1910)
12. Adventure (1911)
13. The Scarlet Plague (1912)
14. The Abysmal Brute (1913)
15. The Valley of the Moon (1913)
16. The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914)
17. The Star Rover (1915)
18. The Little Lady of the Big House (1916)
19. Jerry of the Islands (1917)
20. Michael, Brother of Jerry (1917)
21. Hearts of Three (1920)