I finished The Jungle about 10 days ago. The last many pages were reminiscent of high school and college government classes---Sinclair uses all the familiar catch-phrases to introduce socialism to the reader that I remember listening to in class (and apparently actually absorbing).
Happily, Jurgis finds new life in the socialist message as well as new purpose. And Teddy Roosevelt and Congress got to work reforming the beef packing industry, thanks to the public's outrage after reading Sinclair's book. I think an excellent companion-piece to The Jungle just might be found in the 2009 documentary Food Inc. That because what most impressed me about The Jungle was the description of the utterly rank conditions of the packing houses. Food Inc., focusing on today's food production rather than that of 100 years ago, appears to cover similar ground.
Meanwhile, today I finished reading another book that I particularly enjoyed: The Last Algonquin, by Theodore Kazimiroff. This I can enthusiastically recommend to anyone who's interested in history, especially of the sort that is lost or hidden. It tells the story of--yes--the last Algonquin indian to have lived in what's become The Bronx. He was born sometime before the Civil War, the only child of the last couple of the Turtle Clan to have remained in the region of Pelham Bay Park. The parents died; he tried to live in the white world; finding it not to his liking, he returned to his childhood home, where he lived shielded from all until the author's father encountered him in 1924. Old Joe Two Trees told his life story to TK Sr., himself just a boy, which is related to us by TK Jr.. Completely fascinating and terribly sad. Read The Last Algonquin with another book about New York City history: The Island in the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto, an almost compulsively readable history of
the earliest white settlers on Manhattan Island.
Next up: The Elegance of the Hedgehog...
