Review: Brilliant Book That Stands The Test Of Time
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 30, 2014
This book was written over 100 years ago but is just as relevant today.  At the time, while the story is about the desperate plight of the poor, people instead focused on the food safety issues and enacted laws to protect people from the tainted food being sold.  Today as deregulation has been taking effect and social programs such as food stamps, welfare, and unemployment are being cut, people are again facing tainted food and starvation due to an inability to work.This should be required reading so people may understand why these laws and programs were instituted in the first place to protect workers from corporate greed which goes wild when left unchecked.At the end of the book the author envisions a day when automation will ease the lives of the worker and drop prices.  I wonder if he would be shocked to find that while we have automation today and overall the worker's life is not quite so hard, prices have done nothing but rise and squeeze the working man.  Also, the fact that the practices in the slaughter houses have changed very little in the past 100 years.  It is only in the last few years that Temple Grandin made some inroads in making things easier for the cattle so they are less dangerous to handle and only a few places have accepted her methods.  The description of the slaughter house in the recently published book "The Almond Tree" could have just as easily been the one described in "The Jungle".It is a brutal book to read but is written so well the reader wants to know what will happen next and continues to read.  Few books hold up this well over time, but the sad part is that so much of what is written is still true for so many workers today.