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Title: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Steve Moore, Tony Napoli ISBN: 0785795294 Publisher: Bt Bound Pub. Date: October, 1999 Format: Library Binding Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.60

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Average Customer Rating: 4.26

Rating: 5
Summary: Important story of depression ridden America.
Comment: The passionate saga of the Joad family, who like thousands of American farmers lose their homesteads through a combination of bad luck and poor farming techniques. The Joad's travel west under the false promise of plentiful work in agricultural rich California.

The journey is long and frightening as the family endures humiliation and the threat of starvation. When they arrive in California the Joads discover thousands of other displaced 'Okies' looking for work forcing down wages that the landowners were are willing to pay. They also discover that the landowners will do whatever is necessary to keep wages low.

The Grapes of Wrath is an important American novel that tells a tragic story of an American family trying to stay together and survive under the most dire of circumstances. Generations of young Americans have grown up and never seen economic hard times. Although the bleakness of the conditions may be exagerated, depressioon ravaged America was not anything like it is today. This book gives an insight into just how tough times were.

Ma Joad is one of the strongest female characters ever depicted in American literature as she struggles to feed her family and keep them together. The last few pages involving the still born birth of a child and the feeding of a starving man are tragic. Steinbaeck's novel is passionate and heartbreaking and he had to endure public vilification because of it. His later writings revealed a more conservative nature. Every young American should experience this novel.

Rating: 4
Summary: A harrowing chronicle of poverty and helplessness
Comment: Between 1936 and 1938, Steinbeck wrote a series of newspaper articles for the San Francisco News and the Monterey Trader about the horrendous plight of the migrant workers in California, many of whom arrived from Oklahoma, Texas, and beyond, seeking work during the "Dust Bowl migration" of the 1930s. (Earlier, he had written and published a novel "In Dubious Battle," about labor unrest among those same migrant workers.) The fruit of Steinbeck's years mingling with these workers and investigating their conditions, "The Grapes of Wrath" is a powerful and sympathetic fictional portrayal of one family's horrific odyssey across America in search of work after losing ownership of their farm.

There is certainly more than one way to read this novel: as an incendiary historical document that galvanized the country (Eleanor Roosevelt and various politicians took up the cause of the migrant workers, while conservative-leaning groups and towns banned--or burned--the book); as an epic about human perseverance, survival, and dignity (reflected symbolically in the much-maligned "turtle chapter"); as a political manifesto unflinching in its condemnation of the insensitivities of corporate capitalism (for which Steinbeck was accused of Communist sympathies). Readers who find the novel unrelentingly depressing or unrealistic in its portrayal of the Joad family's fate should understand that the Joads were actually quite lucky. (Very few migrant families, for example, were fortunate enough to live in government camps.)

The first hundred pages or so proceed rather slowly, in part because Steinbeck alternates the chapters about the Joad family with prosaic interludes describing the difficulties facing the migrant workers in general. But the pace of the novel accelerates (and the interludes become shorter), as various members of the Joad family experience frustration, sickness, brief periods of success, and death--never letting go of their dream of settling down somewhere and living in a house. The various members of the family are astonishingly realistic, and their motivations, if simple, are always believable. (The two children are, well, just like children). The ending, which must have been scandalously shocking in the 1930s, is still electrifying; it forcefully shows the desperate lengths the poor were willing to go to help each other when most of America didn't care about their plight.

This is my second time reading the novel, and--although I again found it gripping and moving--I was not as impressed as the first time I read it two decades ago. (I was much more idealistic then, I suppose.) One of the novel's greatest weaknesses is that Steinbeck overstates the evil machinations of the "bad guys" and the good-natured intentions of the "good guys." All the police and the bankers and the landowners are thoroughly malevolent; all the displaced migrant workers and the sharecroppers are faultless (or their shortcomings are unsophisticated, understandable, or well-meaning). As a result, the novel reads in a few places like agitprop rather than fiction.

Of course, that was Steinbeck's intent: he wanted to wake up the country. Yet, as a work of art, this style doesn't date well. Nevertheless, only a cynic or a monopolist could be unmoved by the story of the Joad family. It is truly a classic proletarian novel.

Rating: 5
Summary: captivating work interwoven with names and places of hope
Comment: No one since Steinbeck has so craftily woven the names of places and things into the fabric of the characters' lives. It is a complete joy to read the melange of roadside towns and attractions that seem to haunt the Joads' journey. Their jalopy becomes a metaphor of a broken down world that entraps them. However catastrophic the tragedy becomes, it is a slow and deliberate kind of grief. There always seems to be someone to help send the Joads' on their way. The tale hits home when the Oklahoma family reaches California, the land of hopes and dreams, of liberty, for the Joads' and the rest of the nation. There awaits them a cauldron of discontent among those sharing a similar fate, in the migrant worker camps. Of course, like all Steinbeck works, the novel ends on a dark, albeit sardonic note that is brilliant and one that only he could have produced. This book was a benchmark for what has become the great American road tale