Customer Reviews

Unabridged Jack London

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

1143 pages of Jack London stories, and barely a word of anything else. The editors of this volume have done little more than reprint a large selection of his Yukon stories plus a few sea stories -- they offer no useful commentary of their own on his work. Note that this is NOT "the Complete Jack London." Since he published some 50-odd books in his lifetime, you couldn't get all that into a single volume.

The glory of this book is London's vivid descriptions of the Yukon and its inhabitants during the Klondike Gold Rush. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he wasn't nearly as politically incorrect in his accounts of the natives as I'd feared he was -- he's no Kipling of the North -- but his descriptions of both people and places often seem fresh and insightful. That said, this book contains essentially all of his Yukon stories, and they are not ALL great -- worth reading thorough, nevertheless, but nothing surpasses "To Build a Fire" and "Call of the Wild." (Both of which are in this collection, of course.)

On the purely physical front, my paperback edition was poorly bound, and pages were falling out before I was 2/3 through it.

Jack London is an amazing author but,,, because of the size of this paperback the pages seem to come unglued if not real careful. Knowing this I have stayed away from bending the binding but in order to read the pages you have to pull back and I am paying so much attention to this that I'm not following the plot carefully. In another words the binding really sucks - warning stay away from paperbacks that are too thick