Jack London, known for his turn of the century survival fiction, takes a different approach this time.. Investigative journalism, detailing the real world survival challenges of the poor and hopeless in 1900's East End London. The Language may be dated, but the accounts of the hardships and coping strategies of industrial society's peasants are more than relevant...both as a STFU to those who think hardship is not being able to afford ALL the pay channels and a sobering remimder of where our own society is headed. The book offers a glimpse of pre WWI european economy (East End conditions were abounding throughout most of europe)and social heirarchy and ends with a damning indictment of civilization's "management" Ahard read, with all the archaic prose and references to British money, compounded by the fact that most readers have no way to appraise the value of a 1903 shilling in 2011 dollars, but if you bear in mind that whatever it's worth, working people of the day had significantly less of them than the wealthy, and never enough to maintain what we Americans today would even consider a "poverty level" existence, the reader can still get the two driving points of the work...that things are not as bad for us as we make them out to be, and that we in America better get our $h1t together become they get as bad as pretend they are. You would be grateful to be living on Ramen noodles if you knew what these people went through.
