Customer Reviews

The Star Rover: The Great Reincarnation Novel

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It makes me very sad that only a few people knows about this book. It tells the story of a man who finds himself in prison. He is trapped in a madman's shirt, in order to confess facts he knew nothing about. Obliged to pass days and nights without being able to move a single muscle, living in complete darkness inside special punishment cells, he manages to avoid getting nuts and yet bravely resists his tortures' will. Developing a way of traveling with his mind, he escapes from all human suffering and still has the chance to watch his actions of past lives, finally understanding how most of his present beliefs and flaws had been built.This is a tale about FREEDOM and REDEMPTION! It makes you firmly believe that free spirits are unbeatable and that we can dream no matter how life is. For anybody who is familiar with London's deep feelings about life and dreaming and freedom, I must say that this is his best book ever. A glimpse of the deepest beliefs of a great writer who left us so soon. A MUST!!!

What many people don't realize is that Jack London's STAR ROVER is actually a slightly fictionalized version of a book called THE 25th Man, by a man named Ed Morrell. Ed Morrell is The Man who spent over 15 years in San Quentin Prison and over five years in solitary confinement, mostly restrained in a modified strait jacket. Ed Morrell was faced with two options. First he could simply go slowly insane or he could learn to escape the physical confines of his body. What Mr. Morrell did, I believe, many people will be able to do by the end of this Century. Star Rover, is in fact, a detailed software manual for use with the human mind.

And the woman who Jack London hired to travel and take notes from Mr. Morrell was the very child which Ed used to visit during his out of body travels. Eventually she became Mrs. Morrell and they settled at 7164 Vine Street in Hollywood, California and Ed lived to the ripe old age of 78. What I can't understand is why hasn't the MOVIE been produced yet???

I read this book many years ago and it has stuck in my mind as one of the greatest books I have ever read. It is very different from most of London's books, but I think one of his best. It is truly an original idea and its contents will stay with you for a long time. It is also a great adventure novel!

Prison life has never been easy, and prisoners have always had to endure physical and mental hardship that goes well beyond the suffering of the loss of freedom. Prisoners have oftentimes had to suffer physical abuse and corporal punishment at the hands of prison authorities. "The Jacket" is Jack London's novel that explores one particularly cruel form of physical punishment - straitjacketing of prisoners into a full-body "jacket" that severely restricts the flow of blood to most parts of their bodies, and in extreme cases induces angina.

The main protagonist of "The Jacket" is Darrell Standing, a former university professor who is serving a life imprisonment for a murder. Due to some low-level intrigue amongst prisoners, he is suspected of hiding dynamite and sent to solitary confinement. There he is put into the jacket, and at first he experiences excruciating pain. However, one other prisoner introduces him to a "trick" that would make his condition in the jacket tolerable. He is introduced to a technique of entering a trance-like state where your conscience is freed from the constraints of your body and is free to roam the universe. Once Standing accomplishes this state of mind, he starts to recall episodes from what he believes are his previous lives. These various episodes form the bulk of the narrative in the book, and each one of them can be read as a separate short story. The stories are very interesting in their own right. This is a very good thing, because otherwise the constant repeated recollection of previous lives could make the plot development tedious. Standing is convinced that these experiences are real, and even though there are some very strong hints throughout the novel that seem to corroborate this view, there is never a strong "smoking gun" proof of any of that.

The theme of reincarnation and past life recollections has today become extremely commonplace, and is usually associated with practitioners of some eastern religions and new-age practices. However, a century ago these things must have still been novel, at least to the general public. Regardless of whether London really believed in reincarnation or not, or whether Darrell Standing really experienced past lives, this novel is a powerful tribute to the endurance and resilience of human spirit even under the harshest imaginable conditions. London is a very good writer, and his prose is fresh and inspiring even a whole century later. This is a book that is well worth reading.

The true depth of the talent of Jack London lies in the fact that he could write such a book of imagination. London will be forever remembered for "Call of the Wild" and "White Fang" books, but this one is a huge departure for him. This is really new-age before there was such a term. A prisoner is put in a straight-jacket and in solitary confinement. He travels through several life times by willing himself to death??? Yes, it all comes from the same man that wrote about the wilds of Alaska. Well-written and very engaging for a subject no one really knows anything about. As close to science fiction as London will ever come.

This is not really a novel, it is a collection of short stories held together by a frame-tale. I suspect that Jack London had written these stories over a period of time, and decided to put them together in this fashion in hopes of making them into a novel. But one can still read each story by itself. The themes and backgrounds of the various stories differ greatly, also a few are rather dull, while others are interesting. All in all, a great work and one of London's finest.

yo quiero tener este libro en español. este libro se llama originalmente the jacket, en español la camisa de fuerza.

I want have this book in spanish , too can produce a good traduction.