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browsecomp_plus_17199_73	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS The suffering and deprivation of the boy-hero who finally refuses to fit in makes Dickens's Hard Times seem like easy times indeed. – Lacks coherence and punch though, somehow. \| 7 \| \| \| 107 \| 1906-10-25 \| Up the Slide \| Klondike \| An enterprising youth goes out in wintertime near Dawson in the Yukon to collect firewood in the form of an aged pine that he has spotted hidden in a gully high up on a cliff, and barely escapes with his life. But when wood is selling in Dawson at forty dollars a cord and you are seventeen and you have assured your partner that you will return with a sled-load of firewood, perhaps you are more reckless or at least willing to take risks than most. – An excellent tale for younger people. \| 8 \| \| \| 108 \| 1906-11 \| A Wicked Woman \| General Fiction \| Loretta is a budding young woman visiting family friends to get over her broken love affair with her former fiancé. But although she has a lot going for her — looks, piano-playing and much youthful charm — she has a shameful secret that, so she has been told by her former lover, prevents her from marrying anyone else.
browsecomp_plus_17199_74	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS The kernel of this sketch is the dialogue whereby the silly creature confides her secret to a man who would ever so much like to play a large role in her future. – Sort of amusing in a very minor way, this was later transformed into a (titillating, but still silly) and quite commercially-successful little play. \| 6 \| \| \| 109 \| 1906-11-04 \| The White Man's Way \| Klondike \| An old, very decrepit and very hungry Indian and his wife explain to a lonely white traveller who is staying with them for the night in their deserted village how they had lost each of their sons in turn because of the white man, his incomprehensible ways and his inconsistent behaviour, and thus have no one to take care of them in their old age. – A moving albeit somewhat simplistic reflection on the cultural impact of the representatives of modern civilization on the Northland aboriginal peoples. \| 8 \| \| \| 110 \| 1906-12 \| The Wit of Porportuk (13,900-word novelette) \| Klondike \| El-Soo is the splendid 20-year-old daughter of the chief of a big tribe in the Upper Yukon who has lived life up to the hilt, feasting and entertaining and being generous to one and all all his life.
browsecomp_plus_17199_75	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS But he has had to sell or mortgage all his properties and has run up a huge debt with the village money-lender Porportuk, who hankers after El-Soo who has been educated by missionaries and who is clever and capable as well as being the most desirable young maiden in the Yukon. To escape the clutches of the old usurer, El-Soo organises an auction to sell herself to the highest bidder at the gathering of tribes at the yearly salmon run, attended by one and all and by many wealthy white prospectors and traders come for the occasion. The miser Porportuk who is immensely wealthy is determined to outbid everyone, but the stalwart Akoon, her suitor, openly threatens to shoot anyone who tries to buy his loved one. – The outcome of this conflict not only of generations but of the traditional free-spending, devil-may-care old ways and the hard-nosed materialism of the new age is resolved, after the extravagant auction has been concluded, in an unexpected – and of course violent, this being the Klondike of Jack London – manner that the reader will not forget in a hurry.
browsecomp_plus_17199_76	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 9 \| \| \| 111 \| 1907-01 \| When God Laughs \| General Fiction \| In the story-within-the-story a couple of beautiful people have maintained the intensity and elation of their passionate love-affair years after their marriage, and everyone wonders how they've kept the flame so visibly alive. Well, they do have a secret and, innocent as it is, it rather spoils the splendour of the model that they'd become for the friends who started the story off over a glass or two of golden California wine with a discussion of just what goes into the making of a perfect existence. – The over-lyrical tone and language of the dialogues, both inner and outer alike, reinforce the impression of an interesting subject not quite successfully treated.
browsecomp_plus_17199_77	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 7.5 \| \| \| 112 \| 1907-02 \| Before Adam (39,000-word novella) \| Historical Fiction \| The narrator is a prehistoric youth who recounts his adventures in the middle Pleistocene era several hundred thousand years before our time, when he and his tribe had to coexist and fight against not only ferocious carnivorous animals such as wild dogs, great boars, hyenas, and sabre-tooth tigers but also primitive Tree-People who hated his kind and the newly-emerged Fire-People who had not only mastered fire but also speech (unlike his own people who did not yet have proper language) and deadly new weapons like bows and arrows. His exciting experiences and adventures are related in modern language by a 20th-century youth, who has relived the life and adventures of Big Tooth, the prehistoric hero of this very original and interesting tale, via the recurrent atavistic dreams that have plagued his sleep all his life. – A highly unusual – and most readable – narration by the author in his prime period.
browsecomp_plus_17199_78	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 8.5 \| \| \| 113 \| 1907-03 \| Just Meat aka : Pals (1908) \| Crime Fiction \| We follow the thoughts of a lookout-man who is participating in a house-robbery as he goes down the almost-inevitable path of perdition and discovers that his partner has actually murdered his victim, that he is now wanted for murder too and that his partner has plans to keep the loot all for himself. – The basic idea is interesting – later on Georges Simenon would do this kind of story fuller and more subtler justice – but the execution is rather too bleak and straightforward, and the characters just too one-dimensional for the story to be as interesting as it perhaps could have been, or maybe would have been if the author had set it in a more exotic setting... \| 6 \| \| \| 114 \| 1907-04 \| Created He Them \| General Fiction \| A showdown between two brothers, one of whom (the steady and successful one) has come to take the other (whose addiction to whiskey has ruined the life of his wife and children as well as his own) away for good to an institution for alcoholics. – Slow but solid and insightful about a major social phenomena indeed.
browsecomp_plus_17199_79	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 8 \| \| \| 115 \| 1907-05 \| Morganson's Finish aka : – Finis (1916) – The Death Trail (1959) (9,200-word novelette) \| Klondike \| A starving and half-frozen miner down to his last few biscuits, without money or dogs and weakened by scurvy, lies in ambush waiting for days on end behind a snow bank in the midst of a severe winter in the Klondike for a suitable victim to pass by. We see him deal first with a big moose and then with a pack of wolves that momentarily disrupt his plans, and follow in stunning detail his dramatic and bloody – and final – encounter with three victims who finally appear on the trail. – A tale of crime in the frozen north that will chill your blood. \| 10 \| \| \| 116 \| 1907-05-25 \| A Day's Lodging \| Klondike \| A bitter and intense confrontation in a remote cabin in the Far North on an impossibly-cold (-60°C) day between two men who have gone North to get away from it all, and from each other.
browsecomp_plus_17199_80	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 9 \| \| \| 117 \| 1907-09 \| Negore, the Coward \| Klondike \| In the earlier part of the 19th Century when Alaska was Russian and open war had been declared upon rebellious native tribes, Negore, to prove his valour to his beloved Oona, volunteers to guide a troop of Russians, who are bent on the extermination of the tribe in reprisal for an earlier attack on one of their forts, into a trap. – As hostile to the ultra-violence and cruelty of the Russian occupation of Alaska as London's one other story set in Russian Alaska, the masterful Lost Face, but somewhat less successful, possibly because of being narrated through the perhaps somewhat simplified mindset of Negore, this well-told tale of terror and sacrifice and revenge and very bloody warfare is not one that the reader will easily, if ever, forget. \| 8.5 \| \| \| 118 \| 1907-09-26 \| Chased by the Trail \| Klondike \| Two boys try desperately to cross the half-frozen Yukon river to carry an urgent message to a prospector on the other side but have the scare of their lives when an enormous ice-jam higher up the river breaks and they have to paddle with all their might downriver ahead of the oncoming ice floes.
browsecomp_plus_17199_81	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS – an excellent adventure story, particularly for the younger generation. \| 9 \| \| \| 119 \| 1908-01 \| The Passing of Marcus O'Brien \| Klondike \| Red Cow is a tiny mining settlement of forty souls in the days before the Klondike gold stampede, and its isolated denizens maintain law and order by rough frontier methods. In particular by punishing murder with exile with a minimum of food – or none if the misdemeanour is a severe one – on a canoe to float downriver, the equivalent of a death sentence as the mouth of the Yukon in the Bering Sea is over two thousand miles away through the most barren and inhospitable territory imaginable. The story opens with the passing of such a sentence by the ad hoc judge of the title, and we follow the same judge's adventures that very day as he not only strikes pay dirt but embarks upon a monumental whisky-fuelled negotiation with the town's bar-owner, who wants to buy up his claim. The next morning not only does the judge wake up with a skull-boggling headache, but finds himself in a canoe floating down the Yukon, with no grub at all, his drinking companion's idea of a joke. –
browsecomp_plus_17199_82	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS In spite of its initially almost farcical tone, there is meat and constancy to this highly enjoyable tale, one of the author's rare ventures into the comedy vein and a most successful one at that, with the most stunning descriptions of that wild land. \| 9 \| \| \| 120 \| 1908-01 \| Trust \| Klondike \| Frank Churchill, who is leaving Dawson City to catch the last boat for Seattle before the winter freeze-up of the Yukon River, is asked by a close friend at the last minute to deliver a precious knapsack for him back home in Seattle. There are unforeseen delays though, and a desperate dash needs to be made to catch the last relay boat before it is too late. This is the almost incredible odyssey of a man driving forward against all odds and in spite of the most terrible conditions and obstacles imaginable to catch up with the relay boat at all costs, always carrying the heavy knapsack that he dares not consign to anyone else. – Although the combination of pitfalls and difficulties that our man has to face to win through may seem a tad contrived on the whole, this is a fascinating condensate of the extraordinary hardships experienced by so many travellers in the gold-rush era of the Yukon.
browsecomp_plus_17199_83	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 9 \| \| \| 121 \| 1908-02 \| That Spot \| Klondike \| Spot is a magnificent husky dog, bigger and stronger and fiercer and more dominant than any of the others, but he has a most regrettable failing : he just doesn't want to work. This is the narrative of one of his owners, told in a quite irresistibly wry, tongue-in-cheek manner, describing the desperate efforts he and his gold-mining partner had exerted to train, tame, trade, sell or otherwise dispose of this unusual – and highly intelligent – animal that has just about the strongest personalty of any dog I have ever read about. – By Gawd, Jack London sure knew how to write about dawgs !! \| 9 \| \| \| 122 \| 1908-04 \| Flush of Gold \| Klondike \| A prospector and his guide seek shelter in an isolated cabin in the wilderness where they are made welcome by a beautiful but very strange woman whose story of love, betrayal, tragedy and insanity is later recounted by the guide. – Strong atmosphere and typically "Londonian" overtones of impending doom, even though the story veers at the end towards the tall tale and perhaps loses thereby a certain element of the universality that characterises many of London's other Klondike stories of the same period.
browsecomp_plus_17199_84	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 8 \| \| \| 123 \| 1908-04 \| Make Westing \| Sailing \| The Mary Rogers is a big three-master that has been trying for seven weeks to round Cape Horn in the face of impossibly-contrary winds. Conditions are not good on board and the captain is determined at all costs to break through westwards. When at long last a favourable wind comes up and they are finally on their way to "make westing" successfully, a man falls overboard. Will the captain stop the run to go back to pick him up ? – surely the best story ever written about the famously-difficult passage of Cape Horn in the days of sailing ships. \| 9 \| \| \| 124 \| 1908-08 \| To Build a Fire \| Klondike \| A prospector who has ignored advice never to go out in winter alone has set out on a long trek on an unusually cold day to join his group's campsite further along he frozen Yukon. But it is colder than he thought, there are dangerous pitfalls along the way, and he has seriously underestimated the dangers and difficulties of simply surviving in such extreme conditions. – A stark and chilling (!) story that has generally considered as one of Jack London's finest.
browsecomp_plus_17199_85	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS And so it is, in spite of the barrenness of its setting of snow and ice and yet more snow and ice and its solitary central character somewhat foolishly stumbling towards his doom. Quite perfect for younger readers in spite of its theme of suffering in the face of the awesome power of the elements. And a special focus of interest is a most admirable wolf-dog accompanying the prospector, who is a lot craftier and in tune with his environment than his master. \| 10 \| \| \| 125 \| 1908-10 \| The Enemy of All the World \| Science Fiction \| A malformed and maltreated genius had launched an extremely murderous campaign to dominate the world between 1933 and 1941 (!!) and this is an account of his neglected and unhappy youth, of his astounding capabilities for learning and scientific achievement, and the early misfortunes and miscarriages of justice that definitively turned his resentment into hatred of the rest of the human race. And which set him off on his murderous campaign to revenge himself on the world, culminating in the German-American War of 1939 (!) that cost 800,000 lives and the systematic destruction of coastal defence installations in both America and Europe.
browsecomp_plus_17199_86	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS But all good things must come to an end... – Sort of original really : a mad scientist bent on destroying the world is not as far-fetched as it may have seemed to readers at the time ! \| 7.5 \| \| \| 126 \| 1908-12 \| Aloha Oe \| Hawaii \| A subtly powerful evocation of the race-based social divide between the Hawaiian native-born or half-casts, no matter how beautiful or handsome or talented or wealthy, and the white upper crust of Hawaiian society of the time. \| 9 \| \| \| 127 \| 1908-12-10 \| A Curious Fragment \| Political Fiction \| A fragment of a 29th-Century document, discovered centuries later, records the militant speech of a wandering labourer in the 26th Century encouraging his fellow workers – who are themselves all illiterate, it being a capital crime then to teach a worker to read and write or even learn the alphabet (!!) - to revolt against the slave-labour conditions imposed by a hated oligarchy of hereditary factory owners. A very violent political diatribe that extends the violence and class conflict of London's dystopian novel The Iron Heel far into a very bleak and terrifying future indeed.
browsecomp_plus_17199_87	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS – Definitely too pessimistic by far about mankind's future at the time of writing, this is just so negative about the capability of the capitalist system to evolve towards a more humane and enlightened fate for the mass of the population that is is almost unreadable today. But it certainly provides insight into the political mindset of the articulate far-left of the early 20th Century. As purely science-fiction it is sort of passable, albeit too wrapped up in the hateful aspects of class struggle to be anything more than that. \| 7 \| \| \| 128 \| 1908-12-13 \| Lost Face \| Klondike \| This is how this great story starts : "It was the end. Subienkow had travelled a long trail of bitterness and horror, homing like a dove for the capitals of Europe, and here, farther away than ever, in Russian America, the trail ceased. He sat in the snow, arms tied behind him, waiting the torture. He stared curiously before him at a huge Cossack, prone in the snow, moaning in his pain. The men had finished handling the giant and turned him over to the women. That they exceeded the fiendishness of the men, the man's cries attested."
browsecomp_plus_17199_88	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS – Strong stuff indeed, but just so artfully told, with frequent fast-paced flashbacks to the circumstances that had led up to the final drama and to the wide-open expansionist spirit of those adventurous times. This quite unforgettable drama manages to integrate that something special which, above and beyond the story line, talks to us of the universal essence of the life experience, and elevates it to the rarefied level of an eternal literary masterpiece. \| 10 \| \| \| 129 \| 1909-01 \| The Dream of Debs (7,850-word novelette) \| Political Fiction \| Debs was a labour leader of thirty years beforehand who had always dreamed of being able to organize a general strike, and the narrator awakes to find that the explanation for the unusual quiet on the streets is that Debs's dream has now come true. Extensive discussions ensue about open shops, closed shops, strike-breaking and police and employer violence which have somewhat lost their sting today but which must certainly have been hot topics at the time of writing.
browsecomp_plus_17199_89	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS And the chaotic issue of the general strike is quite different from what the armchair reader of today would tend to expect... \| 7 \| \| \| 130 \| 1909-01 \| The House of Mapuhi (8,800-word novelette) \| South Seas \| A long but action-packed tale describing the circuitous fate of a fabulous pearl found off a remote but populous atoll in the Paumotu Islands in the South Seas, first battled over by traders reluctant to pay the price demanded by its discoverer, Mapuhi – a complete house of his dreams – and then lost along with the majority of the atoll's inhabitants when a phenomenally violent hurricane practically destroys the atoll. Extreme violence and carnage and intense suffering by all concerned – London trademarks – but a surprisingly satisfying outcome. And the most hair-raising, eyewitness-like description of just what a strong hurricane is like that you will ever read... \| 9 \| \| \| 131 \| 1909-04 \| The Seed of McCoy (10,850-word novelette) \| South Seas \| A cargo ship with a great fire raging below decks puts in at Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific where the captain and crew learn to their dismay that there is nowhere on that very remote island where they can beach the ship.
browsecomp_plus_17199_90	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS So they have no alternative but to go on to the nearest island with a suitable lagoon, which is several hundred miles away. Guided by the governor of Pitcairn Island they set out on on this desperate dash for safety but fog, wayward currents, a hurricane wind and plain bad luck combine to make their chances of coming to safety ever more remote. – A cracking good story of the sea and sailing, of seamanship and the struggle to remain calm in the face of extreme danger in a very hostile environment. \| 9 \| \| \| 132 \| 1909-05 \| The Madness of John Harned \| Latin America \| Lovers of bull-fighting abstain : this is a detailed account of the cruelty of that "sport" in one of the second-class arenas that abound in Latin America, and of the increasingly-animated conversation between the local sophisticated and blasé afficionados and a visiting Yankee spectator, clearly representing the author's own views, about this controversial confrontation between man and animal. It finishes badly and bloodily, of course.
browsecomp_plus_17199_91	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 9 \| \| \| 133 \| 1909-05-22 \| South of the Slot \| Political Fiction \| The Slot was the geographical and social dividing line of San Francisco before the Great Earthquake there : north of this distinctive tram-line were the shopping district and the respectable business houses, south of it were the factories and the working-class district. The central character in this militant tale of working-class struggle, strife and strikes lives in both worlds : he is a reputed sociology professor at the University of California renowned for his classic, conservative and very moralistic study of the great labour-ghetto on the other side, who has lived and worked there for so long while gaining material for his books that he has taken on a new, more outgoing and much less straight-jacketed personality and habits when over there, drinking beer with the buddies and boisterously living it up after work most notably. He had become two different men with two different personalities, one a class-conscious and militant union man actively participating in the struggles around him, the other a detached and ratiocinating professor aloofly observing and analysing the outside world. But things come to a boil when each of his separate personalities finds an ideal mate of its own kind, each on separate sides of the social divide.
browsecomp_plus_17199_92	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Marriage if not polygamy is on the cards, and things come to a crunch when both sides of his personality get swept up in a violent city-wide Meat Strike. – A fable providing interesting insight into the tense and often violent social and labour relations that were prevalent in sunny California then and for long afterwards too. \| 8.5 \| \| \| 134 \| 1909-06 \| Good-Bye, Jack \| Hawaii \| One of the richest and most eligible bachelors in Hawaii, a paragon of courage and fortitude, discovers that his lady love is on the point of being interned on the island of Molokai where lepers from all the Hawaiian islands are compounded for life with no hope of ever returning. – Above and beyond the question of the treatment of leprosy in those (un)enlightened days, the critical tone of this seemingly-straightforward social fable is established from the start by the following semi-sarcastic and bitingly bitter remarks about the history of the American colonisation of those islands : "Hawaii is a queer place ... The humble New Englanders who came out in the third decade of the nineteenth century, came for the lofty purpose of teaching the kanakas the true religion, the worship of the one and only genuine and undeniable God.
browsecomp_plus_17199_93	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS So well did they succeed in this, and also in civilizing the kanaka, that by the second or third generation he was practically extinct. This being the fruit of the seed of the Gospel, the fruit of the seed of the missionaries (the sons and the grandsons) was the possession of the islands themselves – of the land, the ports, the town sites and the sugar plantations. The missionary who came to give the bread of life remained to gobble up the whole heathen feast." \| 8.5 \| \| \| 135 \| 1909-06-26 \| The Chinago \| South Seas \| Ah Cho is an indentured Chinese "coolie" ("serf" would be even more accurate description of his condition) on a French plantation in Polynesia who has been arrested and condemned to prison for twenty years after the slaying of the (criminally-brutal) foreman by another coolie, and we follow his thought processes as he wonders at the stupidity of the French judge and policemen who are incapable of discovering the identity of the murderer and who have nevertheless condemned another of the group, a certain Ah Chow, to death simply because he was present at the slaying, to set an example.
browsecomp_plus_17199_94	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS But name confusion arises and Ah Cho is guillotined in place of Ah Chow, as the white devils don't really care as long as one of the Chinagos goes under the knife. – Related by Ah Cho in rudimentary language, the account is a tad too simplistic to be quite satisfying, but it impresses nevertheless. \| 7 \| \| \| 136 \| 1909-08 \| The Sheriff of Kona \| Hawaii \| Kona is a "lotus land where every day is like every day, and every day is a paradise of days", where it is always calm thanks to the special geography which shelters it from the violent winds that perpetually rage around the other Hawaiian islands nearby, and leaves only refreshing breezes and the cool air that blows down from its magnificent mountains. Yet the Sheriff of Kona, an athlete and a giant, left this island paradise with all his family, and this sad story of disease (leprosy, that curse of Hawaii) and despair tells why and how.
browsecomp_plus_17199_95	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 8.5 \| \| \| 137 \| 1909-09 \| The Heathen (8,000-word novelette) \| South Seas \| The narrator recounts how he first met Otoo, a native of Bora Bora, the only non-Christian on that island, on a heavily overladen tramp ship that sank when hit by a horrific hurricane and of which he and Otoo – who mutually saved each other's lives that day – were the only survivors. They became blood brothers, a sacred bond in those parts involving notably the exchange of names, and were inseparable from then on. This very moving tale details the workings of that unbreakable bond for the rest of their existences. – Reader beware : once you have read this story, you will never be able to forget Otoo (pronounced oh-to-oh), the most wonderful blood brother any man ever had. In the moving closing words of the author : "If Jehovah be from His high place watching every sparrow fall, not least in His kingdom shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora Bora."
browsecomp_plus_17199_96	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 10 \| \| \| 138 \| 1909-11-20 \| A Piece of Steak (7,600-word novelette) \| Boxing \| An ageing boxer in the Australian out-lands prepares for a big fight that he desperately needs to win to provide for his undernourished family. But times are hard, very hard, and he just cannot have the good piece of steak that he knows from experience his body needs to meet the challenge of the up-and-coming upstart he is about to confront. The account of his struggle to nevertheless dominate his opponent through fifteen long and bitter rounds, interspersed with flashbacks to to his days of glory and to scenes illustrating the dramatic social conditions of the time, is expertly told – the author must surely have been a practitioner of the noble art himself – and is as tense and dramatic and full of emotional impact and social import as any sports story that you will ever read. \| 10 \| \| \| 139 \| 1909-12 \| Koolau the Leper \| Hawaii \| Koolau is the leader of a group of natives on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, all severely stricken with leprosy, who have gathered in an impregnable mountain fortress to resist internment by the authorities on the prison-island of Molokai from which there is no return.
browsecomp_plus_17199_97	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS This is the story of their struggle to remain free, heightened in intensity from start to finish by the fiery anti-missionary and anti-governmental diatribes of their determined but doomed leader. – Were race relations really that bad in the bad old days n Hawaii ? Wow ! \| 9 \| \| \| 140 \| 1909-12 \| Mauki \| South Seas \| Mauki is a coal-black young Solomon Islander who has been forced into a long-term slavish contract as a plantation labourer under the most severest discipline imaginable. This is the story of the hardships he endured, of his numerous and often bloody and always-severely-punished attempts to escape, and in general of what it was like in the early days of the 20th Century to be what can safely be described as a basically very savage stone-age head-hunting Melanesian islander trying to come to terms with the encroachments of the white man and his all-conquering civilization. – Stark and brutal but dramatically compelling, this tell-it-like-it-really-is/was approach to race relations in the South Pacific at the time is most effective.
browsecomp_plus_17199_98	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 9 \| \| \| 141 \| 1909-12-29 \| The Mission of John Starhurst aka : The Whale Tooth (1910) \| South Seas \| Eat or be eaten was the law of the land among the head-hunters of the Fiji Islands, and John Starhurst has been sent on a mission there to christianise the tribes and put a stop to this barbaric tradition. He courageously proceeds inland to the mountains where no white man had ever penetrated before, but unfortunately for him one of his converts, who secretly resents the new morals, has sent a messenger before him with a magnificent whale-tooth as present for the chief of the mountain stronghold he is set on visiting – a present which obliges the receiver to accede to whatever request is made by the giver. The reader's admiration for the courage displayed by the missionary just has to be tempered by a certain astonishment at the man's foolish temerity. It ends badly, of course, except for the headhunters, that is.
browsecomp_plus_17199_99	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 7.5 \| \| \| 142 \| 1910-02 \| Goliah aka : Goliath (9,100-word novelette) \| Political Fiction \| Walter Basset, a captain of industry, "one of the small group that controlled the nation in everything but name", receives a curious letter from a certain Goliah inviting him, with nine fellow-captains of industry, to visit the writer of the letter on his little-known Pacific island "for the purpose of considering plans for the reconstruction of society upon a more rational basis." The letter goes on to explain that the penalty for non-observance of this summons is the death penalty. Only Walter Basset accepts the invitation on the appointed day – and the nine others are all found dead of a mysterious disintegration of their cell tissues. Follows a similar invitation to ten political leaders, all of whom ignore the summons and who equally suffer a sudden and violent demise, which causes the US navy to launch an all-out assault on the island retreat, with disastrous consequences to the (ex-)fleet.
browsecomp_plus_17199_100	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Goliah proceeds to destroy the Japanese fleet, to order worldwide disarmament and disbandment of the world's armies, to outlaw child labour and the employment of women in factories (!), and to do away with private property, with the stock market and with commerce in general. By 1925 royalty worldwide had been abolished, by 1938 the working day reduced to two hours, the maximum working age to forty-eight, and prosperity and happiness has flourished all over the world. And in later epochs, Goliah, the genial inventor of the "Energon" that harnesses the power of solar rays, was honoured by the world as the greatest benefactor of mankind of all time. – A truly amazing albeit delirious socialist dream. \| 7 \| \| \| 143 \| 1910-03 \| Chun Ah Chun \| Hawaii \| Ah Chun had served from his sixth to his twenty-fourth year as a slave on his uncle's farm near Canton until he managed to escape by contracting to work for three years on a sugar plantation in Hawaii.
browsecomp_plus_17199_101	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Hard-working, very astute and doted with a second sight for investment opportunities, he has acquired not only an immense fortune and a position of great social importance in Hawaii, but also a wife of mixed European origins and a family of fifteen magnificent children, all educated in the finest universities in the West. Key problems remain to be solved however : the culture gap which prevents the potentially-suitable scions of the Hawaiian upper class from marrying his half-Chinese daughters, how to ensure a peaceable old age for himself in face of the inevitable squabbling among his offspring for control of his empire, and above all how to satisfy his longing to return to the beloved China of his youth while there is still time. It will come as no surprise to know that Ah Chun rises to the challenge and finds a most satisfactory solution to all of these conundrums. – one of the very best of the author's Hawaii stories. \| 9 \| \| \| 144 \| 1910-03 \| The Terrible Solomons \| South Seas \| A half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek account of an innocent young tourist's discovery of the everyday violence rampant both on the ships that navigate around the Solomon Islands and on land in and around the trading posts and European-run plantations in those parts. –
browsecomp_plus_17199_102	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Although we know that race relations were very different when this story was written from what they are today, nevertheless the racist terminology and the casual callousness by which blacks are murdered out-of-hand throughout this long and extraordinarily-bloody farce are just too much for the modern reader. True, the natives are head-hunters and man-eaters and just as bent on murder and mayhem as any of the white sailors and settlers in the story, but no, in spite of the subjacent humour and the liveliness of the action, this story is more a testimonial to the misguided white-superiority ideology of so many Europeans (and Americans, including the author one has to admit) of those times than an acceptable work of literature for our hopefully-more-enlightened days.
browsecomp_plus_17199_103	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 4 \| \| \| 145 \| 1910-05-14 \| The Inevitable White Man \| South Seas \| This cruel sailor's tale about ultra-violence and conflict not to say outright warfare with savage head-hunters in the South Seas starts off with the following off-putting declaration just to set the tone : "The black will never understand the white, nor the white black, as long as black is black and white is white.", and carries on to describe the exploits of a useless sailor who could do absolutely nothing right except one thing – shoot like you wouldn't believe. So we read on about how this crack sharpshooter succeeds in warding off masses of attacking head-hunting savages during a recruitment drive for hired labour among the Solomon Islands. It finishes in about the same ugly vein as it started, I'm sorry to say. – Most distasteful.
browsecomp_plus_17199_104	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 4 \| \| \| 146 \| 1910-07 \| The Unparalleled Invasion \| Political Fiction \| The logical – or at least possible – consequences of the entry of Japan into the concert of nations by their stunning victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 is extrapolated throughout the rest of the century as Japan first expands into Manchuria, Korea and then China, which it utterly modernises on its own model, and opens up vast new resources and capabilities for China itself. With the end of traditional famines, the population of China explodes until they outnumber the Japanese by tenfold and begin to overflow into neighbouring regions. The Japanese are politely sent back to their tiny islands to cultivate their culture, the French in Indochina are swallowed up by a million well-armed troops and their families, and the flood of industrious and ever-more-numerous Chinese migrants continues into the rest of Asia and beyond. The West is terrified and powerless – if the amazing expansion of the Chinese population continues they will number a billion and a half by the end of the 20th century ! Invasion of China is impossible, as an abortive attempt by the French, who lost an entire army of 250,000 men in trying to do just that, had shown.
browsecomp_plus_17199_105	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS The new modern and ever-impenetrable China seemed irresistible – but in 1974 a scientist in New York has a (very nasty) idea that just might work... – A pessimistic and antagonistic perception of East-West relations, a quite amazing reflection of the widespread Yellow Peril mentality of the time. \| 6 \| \| \| 147 \| 1910-09 \| Winged Blackmail \| Crime Fiction \| A high-flying financier receives polite but uncouth and menacing letters by carrier pigeon (!) demanding large sums of money by return pigeon or else. When the "else" turns out to be a series of increasingly-destructive bombings he just has to find a way to follow the pigeon back to its owner, not an easy challenge. But his family gathers round and justice will be done. \| 7 \| \| \| 148 \| 1910-09-10 \| When the World Was Young \| Fantasy \| A burglar clandestinely entering the grounds of a mansion near San Francisco stumbles upon a strange sleeping wild man who seems to be a throwback from primitive times thousands of years ago.
browsecomp_plus_17199_106	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS And this is the story of that wild man, in fact the owner of the mansion who is a successful businessman by day and a primitive Teuton of the Stone Age by night. – Strange indeed – one of Jack London's quite rare forays into the realm of fantasy [ 3]. \| 7 \| \| \| 149 \| 1910-11-12 \| The Benefit of the Doubt \| General Fiction \| A man returns to the town of his youth to find it rougher and tougher and unfairer than when he had grown up there. The police and the judges are even worse than the (very) rough men in the low dive he wanders into, but our man manages to get his own back in the end. – A story inspired by a somewhat similar true-life experience of the author.
browsecomp_plus_17199_107	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 7 \| \| \| 150 \| 1910-11-19 \| Under the Deck Awnings \| South Seas \| A group of fellows on an ocean liner are debating whether or not a gentleman could ever call a woman a pig (!), and to illustrate his opinion to the affirmative one of them describes a crossing he had made when a certain elegant, athletic and very sought-after high-bred young woman who had everyone on board so much under her sway that she practically ran the ship. But she was called that very name after a tragic happening which would never have occurred had she not been such an overweening self-centred little xxx. – Grim ! \| 7.5 \| \| \| 151 \| 1910-12 \| "Yah ! Yah ! Yah !" \| South Seas \| The narrator cannot understand how a whisky-guzzling, scrawny old Scotchman, never sober from 6 o'clock in the morning onwards and the only European on the isolated island of Oolong, could so effortlessly lord it over the whole island and its six thousand warlike inhabitants who so uncomplainingly submit to his slightest whim.
browsecomp_plus_17199_108	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Then one evening one of the natives tells him how some twenty years previously they had, in keeping with a centuries-long tradition, launched a surprise attack on a schooner that had unsuspectingly entered their lagoon, and how in spite of their overwhelming superiority one of the crew members, armed with a repeater rifle, had managed to escape the massacre with a few other crewmen, taunting the attackers all the time with the strange cry of the title. The islander goes on to detail the terrible consequences of that bloody battle and we come away, with the narrator, wiser – and a lot sadder – about just how Western civilization spread to that particular part of the world. \| 9.5 \| \| \| 152 \| 1910-12 \| The House of Pride \| Hawaii \| Percival Ford is a very strait-laced multimillionaire on Hawaii, son of a puritan missionary who had made a fortune buying up native lands on the cheap. He is approaching middle age now and is as prurient – and convinced of his inner moral superiority – as ever, and particularly ill at ease with the loose Hawaiian morals he sees flourishing all around him. When he discovers that one of the objects of his moral opprobrium and intolerance is in fact an illegitimate son of his own idealised father, his stern moral outlook begins to crumble.
browsecomp_plus_17199_109	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS But people of his ilk do not change their world-outlook on the spur of the moment... \| 7 \| \| \| 153 \| 1910-12-10 \| To Kill a Man \| Crime Fiction \| A woman hears a noise in the dead of night and discovers a burglar in her living room. Although he's armed with a revolver and just wants to leave now that she's come, he is soft-spoken and clearly not too dangerous so she engages him in conversation to better understand his motives. She and we learn that he in fact is out to take revenge on her father after having been unfairly deprived by him of his job at the father's factory. The more they talk, the more the roles become reversed, and we discover that the lady is not as beautiful a person as we had thought at the beginning of the story... \| 7 \| \| \| 154 \| 1910-12-18 \| Bunches of Knuckles \| South Seas \| A couple on a long cruise in the South Seas tries unsuccessfully to cope with the first mate of the ship, an ex-convict whom they have tried to help in spite of misgivings about his past. Things go from bad to tragic until fate lends a helping hand.
browsecomp_plus_17199_110	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 8.5 \| \| \| 155 \| 1911-01 \| The "Francis Spaight" \| Sailing \| The Francis Spaight is a lumber-laden cargo ship that has capsized in a North Atlantic gale because of the carelessness of its inexperienced crew and particularly because of the incompetence of the steersman. It drifts de-masted for days without sighting another ship, with no shelter and above all practically no food for the survivors. The sailors finally decide to sacrifice one of theirs to replenish their food supplies, and this story, sub-titled "A True Tale Retold" which it no doubt is, recounts in dreadful detail the tragic events that follow. – Too grim for words. \| 7 \| \| \| 156 \| 1911-02-11 \| The Hobo and the Fairy \| Hobos \| A dirty, dishevelled, down-and-out tramp is sleeping under a tree and a little girl walking by stops to protect him from the sun with her umbrella. She engages him in conversation when he wakes up, and the tramp, a hardened ex-convict, relives the terrible things he has seen and done as he contemplates her innocence and purity.
browsecomp_plus_17199_111	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Something that soothes his savage soul emanates from the little girl though, and as we follow their conversation and learn more about the two of them the full effect of this rare and hard-to-forget story builds up to a suitably powerful climax. \| 10 \| \| \| 157 \| 1911-03 \| The Eternity of Forms aka : The Dead Do Not Come Back (1961) \| Fantasy \| Two brothers have endless arguments about the metaphysics of the title, and here we have extracts from the diary of the surviving one, the positivist-materialist – and very deluded – proponent of the thesis of the later title, who not only leads a double life but sees his double doing things. – You have to be smarter than we are to figure out what exactly is going on here.
browsecomp_plus_17199_112	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 6 \| \| \| 158 \| 1911-03 \| The Strength of the Strong \| Political Fiction \| An elderly and very hairy cave-man recounts to his three grown grandsons the history of their people : how they, the Fish-Eaters, used to be numerous and constantly at war with the neighbouring Meat-Eaters, and how they evolved from a period of incessant wife-stealing and individualism to a co-operative system of government with the progressive introduction of a tribal council, of a hereditary chieftain, of currency, of farming, of a priesthood, of police and of the systematic repression of dissenters. But how continued wife-stealing and the growth of inequalities resulted in the dispersion and destruction of the once-prosperous tribe so that their little group was now all that was left. – A parable of man's social evolution as seen from the (far) left, written in answer to Kipling's anti-socialist parable of the benefits of Empire Melissa, introduced with the following sarcastic and passably aggressive epigraph to make the point clear : "Parables don't lie, but liars will parable. - Lip-King".
browsecomp_plus_17199_113	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 7 \| \| \| 159 \| 1911-05-27 \| A Son of the Sun \| South Seas \| A shifty schooner-owner tries to sneak out of a big debt owed to the hero of this and other stories in the series originally published under the general title of this lead tale, the redoubtable adventurer and multimillionaire wheeler-dealer-businessman David Grief. Grief catches up with him at a remote island in the Solomons, but the polite discussion that ensues rapidly escalates and bullets soon start flying. David Grief, whose exploits and love of excitement and "fun" are recounted at considerable length, does not at all like to be cheated and sets out to make sure that the defaulter-robber's crime does not pay. – Unfortunately the story is quite spoiled for us today because of the off-handed racist slants against the native islanders that abound from the beginning, which may have seemed at the time to be appropriate language for the rough men who utter them, but which are quite simply intolerable to us today.
browsecomp_plus_17199_114	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 6 \| \| \| 160 \| 1911-06 \| The Taste of the Meat (7,850-word novelette) \| Klondike \| Kit Bellew is a 27-year-old journalist who has spent the last five years dabbling at various mostly artistic occupations and whose uncle and cousins are setting off the next day to join in the gold rush to the Klondike. Out of shape and rather lazy by temperament, he's nevertheless determined to live up to his uncle's strenuous expectations and this is the story of how the soft city boy becomes a hardened sourdough wily in the ways of the wild, and manages while he is at it to meet a most interesting young woman "whose walk he would recognize after a thousand years." – A lighthearted account, in keeping with the character of its quite charming central character, of the difficulties and hardships awaiting those many thousands who had set out from the sunny south on that fabled gold-rush trail.
browsecomp_plus_17199_115	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 8.5 \| \| \| 161 \| 1911-06-24 \| The Proud Goat of Aloysius Pankburn \| South Seas \| Ship-owner and wily adventurer David Grief makes a man out of a wealthy but broken-down young fellow totally addicted to alcohol when they set out on a treasure hunt and the young man has no choice but to shape up on the long trip across the Pacific, or else. \| 8.5 \| \| \| 162 \| 1911-07 \| The Meat (8,100-word novelette) \| Klondike \| In this sequel to The Taste of the Meat, Kit (now nicknamed "Smoke") Bellew is working his way along the long Klondike trail as a packer, and has to manage a double workload on the half-rations doled out by his two very wealthy, very well-fed and very miserly not to mention slothful and cowardly would-be mining-entrepreneurs who have hired him.
browsecomp_plus_17199_116	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS The meat of the title is bear-meat, the gauge of a fire-eating all-out tough guy who can do anything and come through any difficulty according to Shorty, his fellow hired packer, and boy, do they both earn that honoured title before they finally manage to somehow make it through rapids and ice-jams and dangers galore all the way to Dawson. – Somehow almost oddly lighthearted in tone, perhaps because of the twangy-western kind of vernacular used throughout the extensive dialogues. \| 8 \| \| \| 163 \| 1911-07 \| The Night-Born \| Klondike \| A wealthy but burnt-out man in a San Francisco clubhouse tells how twelve years previously when he was prospecting virgin country in the Far North he had discovered an Indian tribe that had never seen a white man before, but which was ruled by a very forceful blue-eyed (and very sunburned) white woman who recounted – yes, we are three story-levels down now – the rough path through life she had travelled on her way to this wild wilderness. The jaded and alcohol-fuelled regrets of the former adventurer for what might have been conclude this strong and almost moving story, quite infused with a "Thoreau-esque" love of nature, on a fittingly melancholic note. –
browsecomp_plus_17199_117	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS The title of the story is a reference to the following fine quotation from Thoreau : "The young pines springing up, in the corn field from year to year are a refreshing fact. We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with nature. He has glances of starry recognition, to which our saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. The Society Islanders had their day-born gods, but they were not supposed to be of equal antiquity with the.... night-born gods."
browsecomp_plus_17199_118	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 8.5 \| \| \| 164 \| 1911-07-20 \| The Goat Man of Fuatino aka : The Devils of Fuatino (1912) (9,550-word novelette) \| South Seas \| The trader David Grief's prize schooner arrives at the idyllic island of Fuatino only to be informed by David's blood-brother there that a shipload of pitiless (French, one might almost add : of course) pirates had occupied the island, killed many of the men and captured many of the women. David and his crew ship arms in the middle of the night to the surviving natives and launch an all-out campaign to exterminate the invaders. But the heavily-armed pirates recoil at nothing and use their many hostages for protection, so the struggle is uncertain at best. – A long but well-paced and credible tale of strife and mayhem in those not-so-idyllic-after-all parts.
browsecomp_plus_17199_119	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 8 \| \| \| 165 \| 1911-07-29 \| War \| War story \| A minute-by-minute description of the findings and feelings of a cavalry soldier on a reconnaissance mission in an unspecified war zone (reminiscent of the American Civil War, but with the difference that the enemy troops speak a "hated alien tongue" - could that possibly refer to the southern drawl or to the Yankee way of speech ?) as he advances through woods and prairies and comes upon a battle zone and sees and hears enemy troops approaching. – Short but very gripping, most impressive. \| 9 \| \| \| 166 \| 1911-08 \| The Stampede to Squaw Creek \| Klondike \| "Smoke" Bellew and his partner Shorty are tipped off in the middle of the night that gold has been found nearby, and they sneak out to stake a claim on the new Eldorado Creek before the news gets abroad. While still on the outskirts of town they discover that there are a thousand men ahead of them with the same idea in mind and a further ten thousand coming along fast behind – a typical Dawson stampede is under way !
browsecomp_plus_17199_120	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS As they have been hardened by a year on the trail, when they pick up the pace to a near-run in spite of the ice and the deep snowdrifts and the -55° C. temperature they rapidly start catching up to the leaders, most of whom are tenderfoot novices unused to the extreme conditions of the Yukon. But some of them are stronger and wilier – and luckier – than it would appear, as they find out the hard way. – An interesting insight into the gold-rush mentality of those heroic days. \| 8.5 \| \| \| 167 \| 1911-08-19 \| The Mexican (9,300-word novelette) \| Boxing \| An undercover member of the Junta of the Mexican Revolution that is preparing to overthrow the dictatorship of Porfiro Diaz has secretly been earning money for the Revolution by boxing after work hours in southern California, and engages, unknown to his revolutionary comrades, in the biggest fight of his career in the hope of bringing to the Junta the winner-take-all stake of $5,000, just the sum which they desperately need to launch their uprising.
browsecomp_plus_17199_121	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS His opponent is an experienced, very tough and very arrogant local hero who is almost certain to beat the unknown upstart, but he and his entourage do not understand the fierceness of young Mexican's dedication to the Cause, nor his visceral hatred of gringos in general and of his opponent in particular. The long and dramatic, round-by-round description of the epic struggle on which the fate of the Revolution is at stake will have you on the edge of your chair throughout. – What a match, and what a writer ! \| 9.5 \| \| \| 168 \| 1911-09 \| Shorty Dreams aka : Shorty Has a Dream \| Klondike \| "Smoke" Bellew's partner Shorty has a hunch that he's about to get lucky at the roulette tables in Dawson but has to concede defeat after losing a pile of gold dust. "Smoke" though, after careful observation of the proceedings, declares that he believes he's found a system to beat the roulette and really clean up and soon starts applying his new method most successfully – so much so that the syndicate of casino-owners offers him a big prize to stop their torture and to reveal his secret method.
browsecomp_plus_17199_122	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Which he does most convincingly, to their relief – and to their chagrin when they realize just what he's been up to. – A light sketch of the dark side of the night life in the brief heyday of the gold capital of the world. \| 8 \| \| \| 169 \| 1911-09 \| The Abysmal Brute (23,500-word novella) \| Boxing \| The narrator of this story-with-a-message (that boxing is a corrupt business) is an (apparently) honest boxing manager who has been introduced to a phenomenally talented 22-year-old young giant whose father, a former boxing champion, has been training him intensively in their hideout in the woods of Northern California ever since the boy was seven. The manager has one look at this monstrously-talented and very handsome youth who has never been to the big city and takes him on a circuit of fights aimed at giving him a chance as soon as possible to land the heavyweight championship of the world, which he is practically certain to do if his manager can only arrange the fight.
browsecomp_plus_17199_123	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS But one day a spirited lady reporter enters the scene and the things she says and the irresistible impact that her personality and her values make on the "Anonymous Brute" (as he has been dubbed) change the course of the story and the boxer's life and ambitions forever. – The fight scene is remarkable. \| 8 \| \| \| 170 \| 1911-09-02 \| A Little Account with Swithin Hall \| South Seas \| David Grief's sturdiest schooner makes it through a big hurricane intact, but their chronometer has slipped a clog and they don't know where they are when they come across an uncharted island where three men are driving a gang of native labourers to extract thousands of dollars worth of precious pearls from the seabed. Detective work and some clever manoeuvring by David Grief enable him and his shipmates to resolve the mystery of who these men are, how they came to be in such a remote location, and how they'd been able to build such a well-equipped mansion. And how to settle a sizeable old debt.
browsecomp_plus_17199_124	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 7 \| \| \| 171 \| 1911-09-30 \| A Goboto Night \| South Seas \| The essential character of life on this little South Sea island is summed up in the following phrase : "Life at Goboto is heated, unhealthy, and lurid, and for its size it asserts the distinction of more cases of acute alcoholism in the world. Guvutu, over in the Solomons, claims that it drinks between drinks. Goboto does not deny this. It merely states, in passing, that in the Goboto chronology no such interval of time is known.". – Spoiled somewhat by regular racist cracks, the account of an evening's quarrelling and gambling – and of course drinking – and of how a particularly overbearing and arrogant visitor not only gets his comeuppance from but is quite turned around by David Grief, is not without interest. \| 7 \| \| \| 172 \| 1911-10 \| The Man on the Other Bank \| Klondike \| A rather extravagant adventure in the "Smoke Bellew" series where Smoke sets off alone across uncharted territory in search of a mythical lost gold-rich lake and actually manages by sheer chance to find it.
browsecomp_plus_17199_125	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Only to be shot at on his way back by an unknown assailant in hiding and then arrested manu militari by a large group of isolated and very irate prospectors who promptly put him on trial for murder, in true frontier-justice style prevalent in those parts, as the unknown shooter had also shot down one of theirs while leaving no trace of his presence. – Although the story lacks somewhat in credibility, the roughness of the frontier life and above all the splendours of the wild, savage and often very beautiful outdoors are admirably portrayed. \| 7.5 \| \| \| 173 \| 1911-10-14 \| The Pearls of Parlay (9,000-word novelette) \| South Seas \| Parlay is a wizened old Frenchman who has become the ruler of the atoll of Hikihoho in the Paumotan Islands after marrying the queen there. Embittered by the suicide of his beloved – and beautiful and highly-educated – half-caste daughter fifteen years earlier because of the rigid colour bar practised by the high society of the islands, he has built up a fabulous hoard of exceptional pearls and summons the leading traders of the South Seas to his atoll for an auction of the whole lot, at precisely 10 a.m. on a given day.
browsecomp_plus_17199_126	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS But Parlay is considered by the natives to be a sort of witch-doctor who masters the elements, and that day is precisely at the peak of the hurricane season. David Grief, millionaire trader and adventurer, along with a number of other traders, cannot resist the temptation to participate in the auction but when their ships have gathered in the atoll's lagoon the barometer starts going through the floor and by the appointed time on the day of the auction the mother of all hurricanes is on the verge of destroying not only all the ships but the island as well. – the essence of this gripping story is the struggle of one and all just to survive, both on ship and on land, in face of the awesome force of the hurricane winds – Parlay's revenge on the cruel world beyond his little kingdom. \| 9 \| \| \| 174 \| 1911-11 \| The End of the Story (7,800-word novelette) \| Klondike \| A doctor playing cards in a cozy cabin on the Yukon is summoned by an insistent newcomer to rush away with him at all speed on a hundred-mile trip through difficult territory to operate a man who has been desperately wounded by a cougar.
browsecomp_plus_17199_127	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS He does so reluctantly although there's little chance that anyone could possibly survive the terrible mauling the man had received. After three days of almost non-stop intense effort they arrive at the isolated campsite, where the doctor recognizes the woman who's tending to the desperately-wounded man : she is his wife ! and the wounded man is the one who'd stolen her away from him. The doctor, a renowned surgeon who had come up to the Far North to get away from it all after the loss of his wife, struggles with his conscience and finally strikes a deal with her – he'll move heaven and earth to save her lover, if she'll come back to him if and when he has been saved. The deal is struck, and the saga of how the surgeon brings the man back from the brink of death and closes the deal with his wife is the heart of this long, complex and intense story. \| 8.5 \| \| \| 175 \| 1911-11 \| The Race for Number Three \| Klondike \| The Dawson Gold Commissioner has organized a race from the Number Three stake on the rich Mono Creek, whose original but unconfirmed claim will expire at midnight, to the registrar's office in Dawson a hundred and ten miles further down the frozen Yukon.
browsecomp_plus_17199_128	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS The entrants must plant a new four-post stake on the site under tight police surveillance, but not before midnight on the day that the original claim expires, and then set off by dogsled as best and as fast as they can through the inevitable dogsled-jam down the treacherously frozen river. Smoke Bellew is challenged to enter the race by the lady adventurer he had previously met and admired, and he has spent days hunting up the strongest and fastest dog teams available in the whole territory to be used as relays all the way downriver from the bonanza creek to Dawson. But the competition – the best mushers in the whole of the Far North – is fierce and unscrupulous and determined, and the stakes – the claim is worth at least a million dollars – are very high. – Was there ever a dog-sled race like this one, and so dramatically recounted ?
browsecomp_plus_17199_129	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 9 \| \| \| 176 \| 1911-11-11 \| The Jokers of New Gibbon \| South Seas \| A plantation has been established with great difficulty on the island of New Gibbon in face of violent opposition by hostile headhunting natives, and an uneasy peace has reigned for some time there when the natives' ageing chief comes to the German-managed settlement and unsuccessfully tries to cadge some alcohol, strictly forbidden for the natives (the white sailors and administrators in the story use another n-word frequently to describe them) by the regulations in force. Two of the administrators play a joke on the native chief by tricking him into drinking what were in fact other foul mixtures – horse liniment and essence of mustard – with disastrous results indeed. – Not a nice tale by any stretch of the imagination.
browsecomp_plus_17199_130	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Ugh ! \| 4 \| \| \| 177 \| 1911-11-19 \| By the Turtles of Tasman (10,500-word novelette) \| General Fiction \| A very wealthy and straight-laced land-owner and industrialist, a probable future Governor of California, shelters his prodigal and penniless younger brother, who has spent the past twenty years or more wandering all over the world, particularly in the Klondike and the South Seas, sowing his wild oats and living life to the hilt, accompanied by his flashy but very articulate young daughter. – The shock of lifestyles and values that ensues clearly reflects the author's own world-outlook on what makes a life worth having been lived. \| 8.5 \| \| \| 178 \| 1911-12 \| The Little Man \| Klondike \| Smoke Bellew partners up with a likeable fellow prospector to investigate an incredibly rich gold lode that they've stumbled across but as they cross a dangerous ice bridge cracks start appearing, and this is the story of their desperate inch-by-inch struggle to avoid sliding hundreds of feet down to an icy grave below. – Tense reading on the whole, quite perfect for the young audience that the author was probably writing for when he penned this "Smoke Bellew" series of stories.
browsecomp_plus_17199_131	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 8.5 \| \| \| 179 \| 1911-12-23 \| The Unmasking of a Cad aka : The Unmasking of the Cad \| General Fiction \| Percy has a thick veneer of good manners and conventional conduct and although deep down he is quite the opposite of a true gentleman, his good looks and smooth charm have won the day with his fiancée, a very nice, very refined, and very pretty soft touch for gentlemanly gallantry. But Percy slips up when he behaves normally in front of perfect strangers at a restaurant one day, and the truth will out. – Glib and a bit too facile for our taste, but no doubt quite suited for the posh-magazine audience for which it was intended. \| 8 \| \| \| 180 \| 1912* \| The Assassination Bureau, Ltd (32,000-word novella, posthumously completed by Robert L. Fish) \| crime fiction \| The secret organization of the title assassinates people that its clients want to eliminate, providing that its Chief agrees that the deed would be morally justifiable and that society would be better off without them. So they target, always successfully and for a sizeable fee, unworthy citizens such as oppressive police officers, morally unfit businessmen, corrupt politicians, etc.
browsecomp_plus_17199_132	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS However a clever and very wealthy young social reformer has discovered what's going on and early on in the story confronts the Chief with such an overwhelmingly logical line of reasoning that the Chief ends up agreeing with him that the Bureau's acts, while perfectly moral on an individual level, have been socially unjustifiable from a global viewpoint, and he therefore feels morally bound to accept a contract for $50,000 on his own head, demanding only a day's head start to try to get away from the bureau's team of deadly killers ! And the noble young man agrees to replace him as the organization's distributor of funds to the killers for the duration of the contract ! And to complicate matters somewhat he is engaged to be married to a very lovely young woman who just happens to be the Chief's daughter !
browsecomp_plus_17199_133	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS So the chase is on and it is touch and go, as the Chief is an extraordinarily powerful man and expert killer in his own right, so the assassins on his trail are faced with their toughest assignment ever ! – Starting off with an ethical attack on the moral and social values of the modern (capitalist) society almost in the vein of The Iron Heel, this convoluted tale full of almost-farcical ethical ratiocinations rapidly becomes almost farcical full stop, and one can easily understand why Mr. London abandoned the writing of this "crime novella" in 1910 after writing 20,000 words, declaring that he couldn't see how to wind it up. The remaining 40% of the final version was completed in 1963 by the crime-fiction writer Robert L. Fish (who had won the Mystery Writers of America's prestigious Edgar Allan Poe award for best first novel in 1962) and published as "a previously unpublished novel by Jack London" simultaneously in hardcover and paperback editions by McGraw-Hill in 1963.
browsecomp_plus_17199_134	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 5 \| \| \| 181 \| 1912-01 \| The Hanging of Cultus George \| Klondike \| Cultus George is an Indian who has long lived and traded and worked for white men and done business with them, but when asked to participate in a desperate rush to save a starving tribe of Indians who are dying of hunger he will only say "How much ?". Outraged at this insensibility, the others, led by Smoke Bellew, threaten to hang him and, when he persists, proceed to carry out the act. – The stark themes of cultural divide (Cultus George is motivated by his deep bitterness at not being able to be served alcohol like everyone else), of the tragic fragility of the native tribe (75 of whom have already died of starvation when Smoke and his pal Shorty come across them in the snowy wilderness, leading as they do such a fragile nomadic existence entirely dependant on sufficiently abundant supplies of fish and game) and the grim violence of rough-and-ready frontier "justice" strike an unusually sombre note, in sharp contrast with the generally light and almost flippant tone of the "Smoke" series of stories.
browsecomp_plus_17199_135	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 8.5 \| \| \| 182 \| 1912-02 \| The Mistake of Creation \| Klondike \| The prospectors Smoke Bellew and Shorty Jack discover an isolated settlement of neophyte prospectors in dire straits indeed : all are suffering from acute scurvy and several have already died of the dread disease. The pair do their best to help the hundred-odd members of this rapidly-declining colony by applying homemade recipes – hard work and vast quantities of spruce tea – but to little avail until they finally discover why one member of the group has remained healthy and scurvy-free all the while. – An enlightening evocation of the ravages caused by the age-old scourge of scurvy [ 4]. \| 8.5 \| \| \| 183 \| 1912-03 \| A Flutter in Eggs (8,100-word novelette) \| Klondike \| Eggs are going for two dollars each retail in Dawson, and Smoke Bellew and his partner Shorty calculate that if they buy up every one in the whole area they can make a killing by selling them to eager egg-lovers at ten dollars apiece. But they're not the only sharp operators in town, as they learn from bitter experience.
browsecomp_plus_17199_136	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 7 \| \| \| 184 \| 1912-03 \| The Sea Farmer aka : The Sea-Farmer \| Ireland \| Captain MacElrath has been at sea for two and a half years and his ship is at long last entering Dublin harbour, from where he will go as fast as he can to his beloved McGill Island in the north of Ireland. There are seven thousand people on that island and only so much land, so that while the elder sons stay on the farms the others have to go to sea, a necessary evil which they consider to be just another kind of farming that they have to exercise in the intervals before going back to their island. Like all the other members of this community, MacElrath, one of the best captains in the whole Company fleet, marvels that any man not under compulsion should leave a farm to go to sea.
browsecomp_plus_17199_137	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS On the long train ride up north from Dublin with his wife and two-year-old son whom he had never yet seen, he recounts to her the innumerable dangers and mishaps of his latest long voyage, the accidents and loss of life almost routinely suffered, and the awfulness of the various places they stopped over at. – Told all the time in northern-Irish vernacular, a surprisingly sensitive portrayal of a farmer's perception of life at sea. \| 8.5 \| \| \| 185 \| 1912-03-09 \| The Feathers of the Sun (7,750-word novelette) \| South Seas \| Fulualea – "Feathers of the Sun" in Fijian – is a white man and a scoundrel who has managed to get himself appointed as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Chief Justice of the island of Fitu-Iva by supplying the king of the island with an endless supply of alcohol, and who has successfully instituted there a new (and completely bogus) currency as well as imposing severe taxes on all of the island's traders. Trade is at a standstill and the new regime has confiscated all the ships and goods that have come into port, so David Grief will need all his wits and understanding of the islanders' psyche to thwart the unscrupulous swindler. – Light but entertaining.
browsecomp_plus_17199_138	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 7 \| \| \| 186 \| 1912-04 \| The Town-Site of Tra-Lee (8,400-word novelette) \| Klondike \| Prospectors Smoke Bellew and Shorty Jack launch a massive real-estate speculation-cum-swindle that has the whole of Dawson queueing up for a piece of the action at whatever price. – Clever and entertaining. \| 8 \| \| \| 187 \| 1912-05 \| The Prodigal Father \| General Fiction \| Josiah Childs has left his home and his nagging wife in the East to start a new life in Oakland, California, where he's become a new man and a very prosperous merchant. After twelve years absence he decides to go back East to see just how his wife and (now) twelve-year-old son are coming along, and he's in for a major culture shock indeed when he arrives in the cold climate of that small and conservative town of his upbringing, quite the contrast to the dynamic forward-looking Californian atmosphere he has grown to know and love. The wife is even more of a shrew than ever, but the boy is really something. What to do ? – The author's California patriotism shines forth throughout this rather slight fable, and why not ?
browsecomp_plus_17199_139	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 7 \| \| \| 188 \| 1912-05 \| Wonder of Woman (15,700-word novelette) \| Klondike \| The prospectors Smokey Bellew and Shorty Jack are taken prisoner by an unknown tribe of Indians in an unexplored region of the Far North. This tribe, whose chief is a renegade and very ferocious white man, is determined to avoid any contact whatsoever with the outside world and to maintain their absolute independence, so any attempt on the part of our two heroes to escape would be punished more than severely. But the chief's daughter has taken a liking to Smokey against her father's wishes, so sparks are bound to fly, and they do, for better and especially for worse. – By far the most realistic and serious of all the Smoke Bellew stories. \| 9 \| \| \| 189 \| 1912-06 \| The Scarlet Plague (20,200-word novella) \| Science Fiction \| An old man and a young boy, both dressed in rags, encounter a bear in the neighbourhood of San Francisco that the boy wards off with his bow and arrow.
browsecomp_plus_17199_140	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS We are in the year 2073, sixty years after the deadly Scarlet Plague had spread all over the land and completely destroyed civilized life – no one was left in any of the cities and the few survivors have had to survive in the wilds where the struggle for survival of the fittest raged its deadly reign. The old man, a university professor when the catastrophe happened, is the only human alive who had lived through those cataclysmic times. He tries to recount to the boy and his fellow companions the terrible details of how death and destruction rolled through the land and had liberated the worst impulsions in the ever-diminishing surviving population – but the boy can't read and can hardly understand the elder's fancy and by then almost completely obsolete language. And they continue their quasi-hopeless quest for a safe haven. Mankind has almost completed its descent into the primitive savagery of its prehistoric forbears. – This exceptionally far-sighted vision of the "plague-fall" (downfall caused by plague) of civilization as we know it was a brilliant precursor of the end-of-the-world variant of the science-fiction genre that has attracted so much attention in recent years.
browsecomp_plus_17199_141	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 9 \| \| \| 190 \| 1912-12-01 \| The Captain of the Susan Drew \| South Seas \| A family of survivors of the shipwreck of their schooner, adrift on the Pacific in a lifeboat, are taken aboard a tramp ship run by a very hairy, very uncouth and very unpleasant semi-pirate captain. Things go from bad to worse, but you will never guess how it all works out in the end. \| 8.5 \| \| \| 191 \| 1913-05 \| Samuel (7,950-word novelette) \| Ireland \| On the island of McGill in the north of Ireland a sturdy seventy-two-year old woman works her farm alone, abandoned by her children and estranged from all her neighbours. The narrator, visiting the island as a special favour as they don't suffer strangers easily in that special place that no islander ever wants to leave (that we've already learnt about in an earlier story, The Sea Farmer), learns from one of her neighbours the sad story of the tragic nemesis that had always plagued her : all four of her sons, all named Samuel after a beloved youngest brother who had committed suicide after a tragic misunderstanding, had died accidentally or at sea.
browsecomp_plus_17199_142	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS She had persisted in giving them that ill-fated name in spite of the fierce opposition of her family and friends and neighbours – and one by one they had died in an escalating series of accidents and calamities and eventually even murder. – Long and very Irish, with an appropriate touch of superstition. \| 8.5 \| \| \| 192 \| 1914-06 \| Told in the Drooling Ward \| General Fiction \| According to the narrator – who is not a "drooler" but an assistant – droolers, of whom there are fifty-five in his ward, are low-grade people who have something wrong with their arms and legs and can't talk. Whereas the narrator, who has been in the Institution a long time and wouldn't want to be anywhere else, can both walk and talk – he is a "feeb" (feeble-minded) like everyone in the Institute, but a high-grade one, according to him anyway. For example he's thinking about getting married, even though feebs aren't allowed to, as he says to himself after observing the married life of the doctors and nurses that when one's learned to put up with droolers a wife wouldn't be much worse.
browsecomp_plus_17199_143	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS He carries on in that vein about life in the Institution and about the time he was adopted and had escaped back to the Institute, and about the time he ran away and how happy everyone was when he came back, and more. – An interesting experiment in penetrating the mindset of a disturbed outsider thirty years or so before similar and much more famous experiments along the same line by Faulkner and Camus in the forties. \| 8 \| \| \| 193 \| 1916* \| Whose Business Is To Live (8,000-word novelette) \| Latin America \| A group of Americans engineers in Mexico at the height of the Mexican Revolution escape from an armed anti-American mob out for blood after the American occupation of Vera Cruz – we are in 1914 – embark on a dangerous voyage in the midst of social and military pandemonium to rescue a group of isolated Americans, including the lady love of two (!) of the engineers, fifty miles up-river in an isolated mining camp.
browsecomp_plus_17199_144	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Extremely patriotic and not very respectful of the Mexican population (apart from the native Indians, who are OK, the others are "half-breeds" beneath contempt), to put it mildly. – Written in the framework of the author's stint as a war reporter during this episode of the Mexican Revolution, this violent adventure casts a sort-of-interesting light on a little-known episode of Mexican history, but has not dated well. \| 6 \| \| \| 194 \| 1916-05* \| The Hussy (7,700-word novelette) \| Latin America \| An almost-believable tall tale of adventure and hunt for the biggest gold nugget in the history of the world in the disease-ridden and poverty-stricken interior mountains of Ecuador. \| 7 \| \| \| 195 \| 1916-05* \| The Red One (10,000-word novelette) \| Science Fiction \| An enormous peal of cosmic proportions rings out at regular intervals from the unexplored mountainous interior of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, reputed by the bushmen to be an emanation of the devil.
browsecomp_plus_17199_145	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS An exploring geologist who hears the strange sound on the coast penetrates into the interior to investigate, where he's ambushed by head-hunters and forced to flee ever further away from the coast until he's found, weakened by his injuries and fever, by another tribe of head-hunters deeper in the mountains. Where he is held captive, learns their language and mores, and discovers their worship of a mysterious and very sacred huge red sphere known as the Red One, and also The Star-Born. from where the strange sounds emanate and to where they bring sacrificial victims. Our explorer is determined to investigate and what he discovers puts this strange story into the science-fiction genre. – An interesting evocation of life in the jungle regions of the South Seas practically untouched by modern civilization (that exists even nowadays in remote areas of Papua and New Guinea), only spoiled somewhat by the author's unpleasant denigration of the jungle natives with phrases like "Head-hunting, cannibal beast of a human that was as much ape as human, nevertheless Old Ngurn had, according to his lights, played squarer than square."
browsecomp_plus_17199_146	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 8 \| \| \| 196 \| 1916-06* \| On the Makaloa Mat (9,600-word novelette) \| Hawaii \| Two wealthy sisters in their sixties of partly Hawaiian descent talk about the golden days of their youth, and the eldest reveals to her sister an intense love affair she had had at nineteen that determined her thereafter loveless and childless life. – Too much insistence on the genetic qualities of the Hawaiian race for our taste, but a good read for those who like to read about romance in high and wealthy places. \| 7 \| \| \| 197 \| 1916-06* \| The Bones of Kahekili (8,900-word novelette) \| Hawaii \| An ancient Hawaiian servant recounts to his ranch-owner master a quite terrifying story of pagan bone-worship and ritual murder in the far-away days before the arrival of Western missionaries changed Hawaiian society forever. \| 8 \| \| \| 198 \| 1916-06* \| The Tears of Ah Kim \| Hawaii \| Ah Kim is a wealthy merchant in Honolulu's Chinatown who submits uncomplainingly to the beatings that are regularly meted out to him in public by his aged mother, especially for having been seen talking to a certain lady who seems to have her sights set on him.
browsecomp_plus_17199_147	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS He had always been treated so by his revered parent, ever since his youthful days on the banks of the Yangtze river in China. Through his story we learn the story of the rise to social status and prosperity of the hard-working Chinese imported originally into the Hawaiian islands as coolie labour. – There is substance and food for thought behind the light tone of this sociological parable. \| 9 \| \| \| 199 \| 1916-07* \| Shin-Bones aka : In the Cave of the Dead (1919) (10,000-word novelette) \| Hawaii \| A Hawaiian prince recounts how his aged mother had reverted towards the end to her traditional ways, notably to the ancient practice of collecting as many of the bones of her dead relatives as possible, and how she had sent him with her trusted sorcerer-servant on a mission to a secret cache in the interior of a once-inhabited atoll, where her ancestors had systematically accumulated a priceless treasure-trove of precious and incredibly ancient artefacts, including the precious bones of her ancient lineage. – Highly charged with rather hard-to-relate-to Hawaiian folklore and ancestor-worship.
browsecomp_plus_17199_148	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 7 \| \| \| 200 \| 1916-08* \| The Kanaka Surf aka : Man of Mine (11,000-word novelette) \| Hawaii \| Ida and Lee Barton are both lithe and athletic, remarkable swimmers and surfers, as handsome as can be, the envy of all Hawaii. They are the centre of a very lively social whirl, but there is a "but" in the form of a dashing Harvard-educated forty-year-old scientist and scion of Hawaiian society who has become a favourite dancing partner of Ida's. Will this be her first affair, wonders her bemused husband ? When he sees her in the arms of the other man he contrives a cathartic and very dangerous confrontation to test her feelings to the limit and almost beyond. \| 8 \| \| \| 201 \| 1916-08* \| When Alice Told Her Soul \| Hawaii \| Alice had spent her youth so wildly and intensely that she is the best-informed person in Hawaii about the doings and above all the ill-doings of just about every notable citizen on the islands.
browsecomp_plus_17199_149	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS So when at fifty she joins the Pentecostal crusade of a visiting revivalist and decides that it's her moral duty to cleanse her soul by denouncing in a public prayer meeting the wrongs and acts of moral turpitude that are burdening her newly religious soul, there's grave consternation in high places. Magistrates, business magnates, notables of all persuasions and also friends and relatives start showering her with gifts in the hope that she'd omit them from her forthcoming public penitence. But all the gory details come out anyway, and they are very interesting indeed. \| 7.5 \| \| \| 202 \| 1916-09* \| Like Argus of the Ancient Times (10,100-word novelette) \| Klondike \| The title was the rallying song of the hero of this story when he had set out at the age of twenty-two for the California Gold Rush of 1849, and he chants it again in 1897 when he sets out at seventy, much to the opposition of his numerous offspring, to participate in the Klondike Gold Rush craze to try to recuperate the three hundred thousand dollars he needs to buy back the splendid properties he had squandered over the years.
browsecomp_plus_17199_150	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Although he doesn't have any funds to speak of he does have an infinite supply of grit and determination and a willingness to work that gets him there in spite of innumerable obstacles that deter many much younger men. What happens when he gets there and when he comes back to his family in California after making it big up in the snow country is the subject of this tongue-in-cheek pro-old-folks fable. \| 8.5 \| \| \| 203 \| 1916-09* \| The First Poet \| Historical Fiction \| A playlet consisting uniquely of dialogues in which a group of prehistoric cave-men debate about their life in general and women in particular. One of them talks about his new idea of singing songs and telling stories about the stars whispering and coming down in the morning to make the dew and suchlike, thereby seriously antagonising the virile leader of the group who prefers the traditional kind of talk. Violence settles the debate, naturally. – An original sociological exploration of the prehistorical mindset.
browsecomp_plus_17199_151	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 7 \| \| \| 204 \| 1916-09* \| The Princess (10,100-word novelette) \| Hobos \| Three very down-and-out one-armed tramps talk about their once-glorious and healthy past around a roadside campfire, and with the help of a large number of sips of the hobo's standard refreshment alki (drugstore alcohol mixed with water) tell in turn the story of their once-distinguished past, in each case involving wild living in the South Seas and the love of a Polynesian princess (!). – More than the idealised tone of their narratives of former glories in the idyllic isles of the South Seas, this long and quite elaborate narrative with its striking portraits of the idiosyncratic personalities of the three distinctive (and well-educated and articulate !) hobos is a remarkably interesting insight into the life of the myriad of tramps on the move that proliferated in those times, that the author knew well from his own year-long stint on the road in his youth that he recounted in his memoir The Road (1907).
browsecomp_plus_17199_152	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 8.5 \| \| \| 205 \| 1916-10* \| The Water Baby \| Hawaii \| A tall tale is told by an aged Hawaiian fisherman about the fabled exploit of a young boy who understood the language of sharks and used his wits and skills to trick a school of forty sharks that tried to prevent him from diving for lobsters to prepare for a feast for the king. – A fable with an undeniable folklorish charm, it was the last story that Jack London wrote. \| 7.5 \| 2. JACK LONDON'S 15 NOVELS \| date pub. \| _____
browsecomp_plus_17199_153	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Title_________________ \| Setting/ Genre \| Synopsis/comments_____________________________________________________________ \| Our Rating \| words \| \| \| 1 \| 1902 \| A Daughter of the Snows \| Klondike \| Frona Welse is the star of this Klondike tale about the gold-rush and sentimental adventures of an extremely talented, attractive, intelligent, athletic, educated, polyglot, well-traveled, wealthy and just about everything-else young woman of twenty who undertakes on her own the extraordinarily difficult trek over hundreds of miles of dangerous winter wastes from Alaska to Dawson in the Klondike region of northwestern Canada, where she meets up with her ultra-rich father and is courted by just about all the males she comes across. –
browsecomp_plus_17199_154	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS This was Jack London's first full-length novel and although there are a number of interesting and even exciting scenes – the struggle to arrive at Dawson at the beginning, the gold-hunting in the middle, the quite stupendous ice-jam drama at the end – it is irremediably flawed by its constant harping on the racial superiority (yes, that is how it is explained over and over again) of the Teutonic/Anglo-Saxon race over the other less gifted ones, notably the Indians, the negroes, the Asiatics and really all the others too. Because of this extremely distasteful aspect, it is the work of Jack London's that has the most completely failed the test of time – it is practically unreadable today because of that, apart from its over-florid prose style with its avalanche of adjectives and superlatives and its scarcely-credible story line. – Jack must have been tapped over the fingers by his editor and his public alike about this, because he notably toned down thereafter on this (juvenile ?) master-race ideology in his following works, thank goodness.
browsecomp_plus_17199_155	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 5 \| 87,000 \| \| 2 \| 1903 \| The Kempton-Wace Letters (co-authored with Anna Strunsky) \| General Fiction \| The forward to this long exchange of letters is a quotation from a sonnet of Dante : "And of naught else than Love would we discourse", that pretty well sums up the book. It starts off with a missive from Dane Kempton, an English poet in his late forties, to his stepson Herbert Wace, a 25-year old scientist in California, congratulating him in terms over-brimming with joy on the announcement of his engagement to a certain Hester. Herbert calms his ardour somewhat by explaining in a return letter that he is not in fact in love with Hester, but that he has chosen her as a suitable mother for his future chIldren, and follows that up with explanations about love being an artificial cover-up for the basic instincts, that the essential need of man is to perpetuate the race, and that in accordance with the natural-selection processes of Darwin and Herbert Spencer the tendency and the need was "to improve upon nature in the breeding of the human" in the way one breeds race horses and other prize animals.
browsecomp_plus_17199_156	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS The literary Dane doesn't see love in that light at all, and we are off for 150 pages of so of debating about what love is and isn't. So this is really a series of essays on love and procreation, with the letters by Herbert (written by Jack London) stressing in a consistently dogmatic tone a biological and "stirpiculture" (eugenics) function of the relationship between the sexes, while the letters of Dane (written by his close friend Anna Strunsky) talk - endlessly – in suitably flowery prose about how essential love is and has always been and always will be. – Apart from the quite predicable dénouement in the last three pages where there are a couple of short letters from Hester, the young lady who started off the whole debate, nothing actually ever happens in this "novel", that was originally published anonymously to an understandably-lukewarm critical reception.
browsecomp_plus_17199_157	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 5 \| 47,200 \| \| 3 \| 1904 \| The Sea Wolf \| Sailing \| This extraordinary tale of high seas and high emotions starts off calmly enough when the thirty-something, well-read and rather wealthy narrator embarks on a modern steam-driven ferry-boat in the Bay of San Francisco and muses on the efficient division of labour in modern society, whereby well-trained men can efficiently operate such magnificent and complex machines for the benefit of people like him in all security. But then a fog comes up, things do not at all follow the modern-comforts path he had expected, and he is off for an experience that has to be lived through – or at lest read about – to be believed. For our narrator rapidly ends up on a sailing boat setting out on a long and as it turns out extremely perilous hunt for precious seal skins in the wild seas of the northern Pacific, under the command of the forceful, brutal, domineering, intelligent, resourceful and extremely dangerous captain, the aptly-named "Wolf" Larson, one of the most extraordinary and unforgettable sea captains in the whole history of literature, we do believe.
browsecomp_plus_17199_158	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS – Jack London had himself, at the age of 17, spent many months on such a seal-hunting schooner in the Far Pacific, and this background insight helps to explain, above and beyond the author's great talent, why this gripping tale of how the bookish narrator learns about life and sailing and hunting and survival and men — and even women — has such a ring of truth and credibility about it. – No doubt one of the master's best novels, written during his most creative period, one year after The Call of the Wild. \| 9 \| 105,900 \| \| 4 \| 1906 \| White Fang \| Klondike \| The first chapters will have your hair standing on end as you follow the desperate search of a team of two men, six dogs and one corpse to escape from a ravenous pack of wolves following them across the frozen wastes of the Northland. Written at the peak of his writing career in the decade following his youthful participation in the Klondike gold rush of 1897-8, this is the best-known and most widely-read of all of Jack London's novels (apart from The Call of the Wild, which is a novella).
browsecomp_plus_17199_159	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS – It is perhaps a no-doubt-to-be-regretted fact that this remarkable book with its animal hero and many intense scenes of pitiless violence and bloodshed not to say killings by animals and men alike has always been more a "boy's book" than anything else. But that's not a negligible part of the world's population anyway, and one suspects that a great many members of the feminine and adult portions of humanity have nevertheless enjoyed or will or should enjoy this prime product of one of the finest American writers of all time. \| 9 \| 72,100 \| \| 5 \| 1908 \| The Iron Heel \| Political Fiction \| On the face of it, this is way-out political fiction showing an ultra-violent Marxist-type revolution in the USA starting around 1914, with ensuing bloodshed, massacres, resistance, mass executions, dictatorship and final victory of the classless society after seven centuries of struggle ! –
browsecomp_plus_17199_160	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS But the term "socialist" in 21st-century English is a somewhat inadequate term to convey the nature of deeply-felt radical thought at the beginning of the 20th century, when extreme violence was commonplace in labour disputes, when Marx and Engels and Herbert Spencer exercised enormous intellectual influence, when memories of the ultra-violent repression of the Paris Commune of 1871 (when 30,000 resistants were shot in one bloody week by government forces involved in the repression of the revolutionary regime of that city) — here we have the Chicago Commune — were still strong, and when the vision of a classless and non-conflictual society organized in the interests of the common man seemed a perfectly achievable objective. The poor were many and mostly very poor, the rich were few and mostly very rich, suffering and conflict were strife – there was a lot wrong with the way the richest country in the world was functioning ! – In the language of today, Jack was a radical, an extremist, a revolutionary, a believer in violence to achieve political aims, a firm believer in the coming downfall of the capitalistic system – a man who would have been delighted with the bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917 if he had lived long enough.
browsecomp_plus_17199_161	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Unfortunately, for him and for us, he died a tad too early, in November 1916 at the age of 40. \| 7 \| 88,200 \| \| 6 \| 1909 \| Martin Eden \| General Fiction \| About a strong-willed, rough young working-class fellow with years of sailing all over the four seas behind him getting introduced to high society after having rescued the son of a wealthy family from a street brawl, and promptly falling head-over-heels in love with the lovely and very sophisticated daughter of the house. And thereafter doing his best to rise up to the standards of speech, behaviour and intellect expected of him by the object of his attentions and her family, only to find that the more he studies and masters language and the world of books, the more not only does he want to express himself by writing in various domains – poetry, stories, novels, essays, philosophy, nothing is beyond the scope of his immense confidence in his own abilities, intellectual prowess and destiny – but also the more he becomes contemptuous of the shallowness and limitations of the bourgeois society and their values in which his loved one is so perfectly integrated. –
browsecomp_plus_17199_162	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS A rather hard-to-read book, infused with florid, sentimental prose and quite endless harangues about politics and ideology, in particular the hero's obsessional passion about the survival-of-the-fittest social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and the Nietzschean ideal of human evolution towards a superior race of man. While Mr. London's hero is a passionate advocate of individualism, the socialism of his working-class friends and bohemian-intellectual acquaintances provides a foil to his rather excessive rantings about superior beings being above the common lot of people and especially of the detested bourgeois class which had so interested him at the beginning of the book.
browsecomp_plus_17199_163	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS \| 7.5 \| 139,000 \| \| 7 \| 1910 \| Burning Daylight \| General Fiction \| This long and quite ambitious rags-to-riches (and back) story has a long first part describing the adventures of the central personage Elam Harnish – known by one and all as Burning Daylight because of his habit of routing his comrades out of their blankets with the complaint that daylight was burning – on his way to acquiring a formidable fortune in the Klondike gold rush in northern Canada in the late 1890's, and then how he continues his economic adventures in the even tougher world of capitalistic competition down south in San Francisco and New York, to finally discover the truly meaningful objective of his life – living in the hills of the magnificent Sonoma Valley of Northern California with the lady of his dreams.
browsecomp_plus_17199_164	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS – Written in the more relaxed, vernacular later style of the second half of his all-too-short career, this is perhaps not his best-known novel, but it has passed the test of time better than many of the others – and it certainly addresses themes that are of long-lasting interest : the ambiance of those celebrated gold-rush days, the workings and moral destructiveness of unbridled capitalism, and finally and even more forcefully the urgent necessity to protect and preserve the natural marvels that mankind is surrounded with. \| 8 \| 112,000 \| \| 8 \| 1911 \| Adventure \| South Seas \| The central character is a lonely and very isolated faIrly-young man trying to run a cocoanut plantation on remote Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands group in very difficult conditions to say the least – he is the only European on the plantation, the hundred-odd workers are all indentured coolies from the even more savage neighbouring islands, almost all of whom are cannibals who hate him and who are just waiting for an occasion to gang up and carry off his head as a trophy.
browsecomp_plus_17199_165	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS To top it all off he is deadly sick at the beginning with one of the many Solomon Island diseases that were and probably still are so rampant there (such as the mysterious skin disease that the author caught himself there and that forced him to abandon his voyage to the South Seas and return to the U.S. of A. in search of a healthier climate), so we meet him on page 1 being carried around on a native's back but wielding a revolver to discourage hostility. Apart from the nasty natives (always referred to in this opus in the most violently-derogative manner imaginable) and the climate and the financial worries (his only boat gets wrecked early on and the plantation is not making any money) there is also the very disturbing presence of a dashing young woman who lands on his beach (on about page 3 or so) after having been wrecked herself, with a crew of very big and capable Polynesian sailors – the awful locals are only Melanesians, it is explained to us – dedicated to protecting her and helping her to have her own way in whatever she wants to do, which is just about everything including taking over the plantation but not, repeat not, getting married or anything as banal as that.
browsecomp_plus_17199_166	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Well, our fellow is a rather reserved sort of Englishman with you wouldn't believe how many ideas on what is proper behaviour for women in general and younger ones in particular, none of which fit in very well with the lady's own vision. She wants adventure and excitement, and one must admit that she does get it ! But the book is practically unreadable today because of its terribly antiquated colonial-style constant use of the n-word and the author's quite off-putting notions about the superiority of the white race (???!!!). – No go ! \| 5 \| 70,800 \| \| 9 \| 1913 \| The Valley of the Moon \| General Fiction \| Told essentially from the point of view of Saxon, a beautiful young laundry-sweatshop working-girl (named after her Saxon and pioneer fore-bearers of whom she is very proud) who meets at the very beginning of this working-class romance the man of her dreams Billy, a handsome young teamster (driver of teams of horses) and former prize-fighter who also is inordinately proud of his true-blood pioneer ancestors. Billy sweeps her off her feet – the feeling is most mutual – and they get married a couple of weeks after their first encounter.
browsecomp_plus_17199_167	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS We follow the couple as they struggle to make ends meet in San Francisco in the difficult economic state of the times, as Saxon has to stop working as soon as they get married (that was the way in those days, apparently) and Billy rapidly gets into trouble and even jail through his quick temper, his fondness for dealing knockout blows to those who oppose him and especially because of the harsh labour conditions of the time, entailing constant labour conflicts, clashes with strike-breakers and the police, and a general shortage of funds to keep up with the Joneses. Culminating in an ultra-violent gunfight, reminiscent of the Chicago Commune scene in The Iron Heel, between striking mill-workers and strike-breaking scabs right before Saxon's doorstep, where people on both sides, including one of her closest friends, are pitilessly gunned down by the other side – notably when they are down – right before her eyes. Resulting not only in the loss of her unborn child, but a dramatic decline in the fortunes of the couple, and especially a burning desire to escape the awfulness of urban life in general and working-class life in particular.
browsecomp_plus_17199_168	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS So about halfway through the novel the scene completely changes and it becomes a road-novel-on-foot as the couple sets off on a quest with blankets and a couple of pots on their back and twenty dollars in their pockets to wander through California south and north in quest of the ideal "valley of the moon" that Saxon has dreamed about. Where they learn a lot not only about farming but also about people, as they become very friendly with a group of brilliant bohemian-bourgeois artists (Saxon's mother was a poet) who help them on their way to the nirvana they are searching for in the magnificent – but then very undervalued – Sonoma Vally in Northern California. –
browsecomp_plus_17199_169	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS The basic tenet of the tale is that farming is the ideal way for working-class people to have a meaningful and rewarding existence, and while that may or may not appear convincing to the reader, the quite panegyric descriptions of the stunning geography — the redwood forests, the fertile valleys, the splendidly-wild coastline, the mountains teeming with game, the amazingly temperate climate — are on the upside of the novel ; while on the downside we have, unfortunately, the tiresomely broken English and off-puttingly aggressive, overweening and uncouth personality of the lead character Billy, the incessant and quite unsupportable denigration by both of its heroes of anyone who is not of authentic Anglo-Saxon stock, the militant verbosity of the first half and the over-florid prose of the latter half, and its excessive, bordering-on-the-boring, length. \| 6.5 \| 167,800 \| \| 10 \| 1914 \| The Mutiny of the Elsinore \| Sailing \| John Parkhurst is a rich, very successful and very blasé 30-year-old writer who has taken passage on a big 4-masted sailing-ship carrying coals from Baltimore to Seattle with the aim of resting his jaded nerves.
browsecomp_plus_17199_170	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS Right away there are signs that the trip is not going to be an easy one – the crew is a gang of drunken, incompetent landlubbers, his quarters are not the best on the ship much to his annoyance, the captain and first mate are strange fellows indeed and, especially, there is a young woman on board despite his firm specifications that the captain was not to bring his wife on the voyage. But she is the captain's daughter, so he has to put up with her and off the ship goes on a truly memorable voyage that will mark him, and the other not-so-numerous survivors of those five unforgettable months, forever. The narrator Mr. Parkhurst must have done some sailing before becoming such a famous writer, because he describes most effectively and even splendidly the complex manoeuvrings of the sails and the ship throughout this quite epic voyage, first criss-crossing the Atlantic to pick up the appropriate winds, down the coast of Argentina with its spectacular sunsets and then the tremendous challenge of rounding the Horn in the face of mighty 5-week-long gales – all that with a sullen and eventually mutinous crew of dropouts, cripples and outright criminals. –
browsecomp_plus_17199_171	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS A rousing sailing novel at the very end of the centuries-long saga of big sailing ships – we are in 1913, the year of the Titanic – spoiled somewhat by the overweening personality of the narrator, utterly convinced of the innate superiority of his (white-skinned) "race" in general and of his own person in particular. But he certainly writes well ! \| 8 \| 114,500 \| \| 11 \| 1915 \| The Star Rover (aka The Jacket) \| General Fiction with mystic overtones \| A university professor, who has been condemned to life imprisonment in the (in)famous San Quentin prison in California for the murder of another professor in an uncontrolled fit of rage, is constantly subjected to the excruciatingly painful straight-jacket treatment, consisting of leaving him lying on the floor tied up as tightly as possible for hours and even days at a time, to make him confess where the dynamite that a group of convicts is supposed to have smuggled into the prison is hidden as part of a mass break-out plan.
browsecomp_plus_17199_172	ALL THE STORIES AND NOVELS OF JACK LONDON : SYNOPSES, COMMENTS AND RATINGS This imaginary plot has been invented by a prisoner to curry favour with the authorities, who are so convinced that it is true that they unrelentingly subject Professor Standing to ever more severe versions of this San Quentin speciality — The Star Rover was entitled "The Jacket" in its first English edition — until he has been reduced to a ruined skeleton of a human being. But to no avail – not only does our man not know anything about the dynamite in question, but he has a mental method of getting away from his immediate physical surroundings to revisit various episodes of humanity's past existence that he lives intensely and recounts splendidly in his memoirs with great realism and dramatic effect – although humane California has done away with the death penalty for murder, there IS capital punishment for lifers who assault their guardians, so he is writing these recollections on Death Row waiting to be hung for having bloodied the nose of one of the guards.

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