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The Jungle Audible Audiobook – Abridged

Clive Cussler (Author), Jason Culp (Narrator), Penguin Audio (Publisher)

4.3 6,694 ratings

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The extraordinary new adventure from the number-one New York Times- best-selling author.

Jungles come in many forms. There are the steamy rain forests of the Burmese highlands. There are the lies and betrayals of the world of covert operations. And there are the dark and twisted thoughts of a man bent on near-global domination. To pull off their latest mission, Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon must survive them all.

A devastating new weapon unleashed in 13th-century China... a daring rescue in the snowbound mountains along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border... a woman gone missing in the jungles of northern Thailand and Myanmar... for Cabrillo and his crew, all of these events will come together - leading to the greatest threat against U.S. security that the world has ever known.

Public Domain (P)2011 Penguin

Listening Length

6 hours and 26 minutes
Author

Clive Cussler
Narrator

Jason Culp
Audible release date

March 8, 2011
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Audio
ASIN

B004R0SERU
Version

Abridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	6 hours and 26 minutes
Author	Clive Cussler
Narrator	Jason Culp
Audible.com Release Date	March 08, 2011
Publisher	Penguin Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Abridged
Language	English
ASIN	B004R0SERU
Best Sellers Rank	#203,290 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #1,745 in Espionage Thrillers (Audible Books & Originals) #1,788 in Action Thriller & Suspense Fiction #7,356 in Political Thrillers (Books)

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4.3 out of 5

6,694 global ratings

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Linda Linguvic

Great story, strong characters and a plea for social justice. Absolutely amazing!

Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2009

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Published in 1906, this book is famous for exposing the unsanitary and disgusting practices of the meat processing industry in Chicago. I chose to read the original uncensored edition because I didn't want a whitewashed version. I was not disappointed. I got it all, in all its grisly details. Processed meat and sausages included diseased animal meat, rats, the filth on the floor and even the bodies of human workers who got sucked into the lard vats. Yes, these abuses were shocking and resulted in reform and new standards for the industry, but that was only one aspect of the book.

Central to the story is the plight of the workers and, indeed, that was Upton Sinclair's purpose as he went to Chicago on a stipend from a socialist newspaper to expose the exploitation of the factory workers. That is the central theme of the book and I found myself wincing throughout, not only because of the tubercular beef being sold to the public, but mostly because of the degradation of the human beings who were just cogs in the wheels of production.

The story is about a family of Lithuanian immigrants who came to America for a better life. From the very beginning, they were cheated. They were sold a substandard house and never told about the extra taxes, fees and clauses that would cause them to lose the house if they were late with their payments. They had to to walk several miles to work in the stockyards in the dead of winter with inadequate clothing. Children were forced to work too and one little boy lost some fingers from frostbite. Their wages didn't meet their needs and there were times there was no food at all. They could never afford doctors or medicine and if a member of a family was sick or injured that person lost his or her job.

I'll never forget the characters in the book. Ona and Jurgis are a young married couple who we meet at their wedding in the beginning of the book. They are young and they have hope. Jurgis is big and strong and easily gets a job. At first all seems well. But as the book progresses, we see how everyone in the family has no choice but to work. This includes the elderly father and the children. Later, when Jurgis hurts his foot in an accident, he is out of work for months and the family suffers. But even more horror is in store of the family. Mainly, we follow what happens to Jurgis as he loses his job, and circumstances spiral out of control. I felt real emotion for him and his family, amazed at out anyone could endure the hardships they had to face. Eventually the book winds up as the writer wanted it, with anger at the exploitation of the workers.

I loved this book. I read it all at once, starting it at three o'clock one afternoon and reading through most of the night until I finished it. I identified with each of the characters and was amazed at their forbearance and strength through all their adversity. Of course I had heard about these horrible conditions throughout my lifetime. But I never realized how bad they really were. This book opened my eyes. I don't know if I will ever be the same again.

I give this book my highest recommendation. It's not only a great story with great characters, it's a plea for social justice. And its impact can still be felt today.

43 people found this helpful

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Scott J Pearson

Socialism for a post-Gilded Age America

Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2022

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America was a different place in 1906 when Upton Sinclair published The Jungle. Teddy Roosevelt was President. The country was coming out of the Gilded Age capitalism into a new progressive era. Monopolistic trusts dominated the economy. Society resembled more of a two-class system and lacked a dominant middle class. Writing fiction, only realistically like a journalist, Sinclair showed how hard working class life was. A quick bestseller, this book led to national reforms, particularly in the meat-packing industry.

The protagonist Jurgis immigrated to Chicago from Lithuania. After moving, his family quickly fell into poverty. He worked as a meat packer, but seemed utterly unable to overcome the obstacles in front of him. His family fell into disrepair, too, and encountered death, prostitution, and drugs. Sinclair aptly named this book after the urban jungle that this family was trapped in.

The book ended in a jeremiad about the virtues of socialism. These opinions seem irrelevant and naive to twenty-first-century life, but are historically useful to understand the society and psychology of the time. No virtuous path to middle class life existed for this family. Understanding this points to its modern-day pertinence: People do desperate things (like Jurgis and his family did) when their lives lack economic stability. This lesson can explain some contemporary politics.

Though a fantastic success and insightful about American life in the early 1900s, this book has some shortcomings. In an instance of racism of the times, blacks were wrongly denigrated as an inferior race. The jeremiad ending the book seemed unnecessarily preachy. The answers to the problems were reductionistic as economics was portrayed as a catch-all solution.

Still, the historical value of this account remains. Working class life is accurately portrayed in a manner that resonated with the people of the time. Poverty and corruption – both in business and in politics – take center stage. These problems remain today. I hope that society has come closer to lasting solutions, but it is good sometimes to remember what going backwards can quickly turn into.

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Vimanolis

This author never fails to amaze me.

Reviewed in Italy on November 30, 2021

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Loved reading this book and all his other ones.
Full of action and adventure. Highly recommended to all those who love this genre.

Ian Robertson

A Cautionary Tale of Unfettered Capitalism

Reviewed in Canada on January 9, 2019

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Jurgis Rudkis was a young Lithuanian with a dream of betterment - a dream better met in America than where he lived. At the start of the 20th century, he and a group of similarly hopeful Lithuanians made their pilgrimage to the beating heart of capitalism, only to find the heel of its boot. After navigating their way to Chicago’s meat packing district, the families endure extreme hardship and the brutal underside rather than uplifting promise of capitalism.

The Jungle draws comparison to other tales of hardship – for example Faulkner’s The Grapes of Wrath – but Sinclair offers a twist. Rather than a study of characters caught up in an epic event such as the Depression-era Dust Bowl, Sinclair uses his characters’ hardship to critique the setting itself. More specifically, the characters are a vehicle to highlight the uneven and immoral impacts of capitalism, and to deliver a lesson in left-leaning (socialist?) economics and politics.

Sinclair advances his theme in four stages. First, in the largest section, he chronicles the dehumanizing work in Chicago’s meat packing district and the revolting methods the plant owners use to pass off inedible meat to unwitting consumers. If it’s not enough to make readers question the balance of power between labor and capital, it will certainly make them rethink what they eat.

The second, shorter stage shows Jurgis via a scrape with the law up against the broader industrial/political/media complex. It’s not so much that the law is stacked against Jurgis; the justice is perfunctory and with the barest standards of due process. Rather, it is the systemic intertwining political and industrial connections of others accused and acquitted, and of those meting out justice that rankles Sinclair. “Government existed under the form of a democracy. The officials who ruled it, and got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there were two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the one got the office which bought the most votes.”

The third stage - an interlude, really - follows Jurgis as a hobo after turning his back on Chicago, capitalism, and the social contract. He lives by his wits when a chance encounter permits him inside a meat packing industrialist’s mansion. The unneeded, undeserved and unproductive wealth stands in stark contrast to laborers’ deprivation and drives home Sinclair’s message about unfettered capitalism. Jurgis’ life as a hobo, outside the capital/labor struggle, harkens back to an idyllic (Edenic, not Hobbesian) time before capitalism, and foreshadows the possibility of another path … but not before Jurgis takes a turn working within the power structure, which proves less punishing than as a laborer but equally unfruitful.

The fourth stage reconciles the plot elements of the first three stages and presents a socialist alternative. “In America everyone had laughed at the mere idea of Socialism then — in America all men were free. As if political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable!” The Hobbesian bargain had metastasized under the natural power imbalances of capitalism, just as Marx had warned a few decades earlier, and the promise of socialism offered Jurgis a third path. He need not choose between the perpetually antagonistic labor and capital, but rather from a third option, in which one could select a job and receive remuneration based upon his or her contribution (labor hours and skill), all of which would advance broader societal goals. Government (rather than the oppressive capitalists) would establish the value of labor contributions. Sinclair envisioned a workers’ movement which would gently rule, and progress would be guided by ‘an invisible hobo hand’.

Written after both Adam Smith’s and Marx’s theorizing but before the Russian Revolution, history has since shown the weakness of Sinclair’s concluding sermon, and even the labor theory of value that Sinclair touts was being supplanted when the book was written. Still, The Jungle is a seminal and cautionary tale of the power struggle between capital and labor. It applies equally well to the disposability of labor in today’s era of globalization and automation, and perhaps to intellectual capital in the coming era of Artificial Intelligence.

Sinclair’s plot is straightforward – simply a vehicle to critique the capitalist system – and offers none of the rollicking twists in Dickens’ working-class novels. Nor does it feature the robust character development of other authors. What it does offer is one of the first literary indictments of unfettered capitalism, and for this it should be read by all with an interest in politics and economics.

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Perfecto

Reviewed in Spain on October 14, 2019

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Kim Wingerei

A classic still as relevant today as it was in 1906

Reviewed in Australia on January 13, 2024

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The conditions of the meat works are no doubt better, the workers there have more protections, thee are social services in place, minimum wage stipulations, hospitals and half decent policing. But the fundamental struggle, the inherent inequalities and oppression is still there to be fought. It remains to this day a book well worth reading, and not just for Sinclair’s unerring eloquence.

MERCHANT

Five Stars

Reviewed in India on August 21, 2016

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Great story and the book itself physically is stunning.

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