I read this book in eleventh grade US History class. It was one of the few required readings from school that I enjoyed. In The Jungle, we follow the story of Jurgis, a Lithuanian immigrant at the start of the 20th century. This was the time of the Industrial Revolution, and as the author shows us, it was a terrifying time for the working class.

Jurgis gets a job in a meat packing stockyard, and it doesn't take long for everything to go downhill. He is injured on the job, and cannot work, so he is replaced. His family constantly gets sicker and sicker and of course he has no money to pay for anything. Things just will not go right for poor Jurgis, and he pretty much ends up losing everything.

This book will disgust you. Rats that plagued the stockyards were sometimes thrown into the vats and packed with the other meat. Sometimes people fell into these vats, and no one even stops to think about it...

The Jungle was a very interesting book. In its time, it was so powerful that it even caused the President at the time, Theodore Roosevelt, to launch an investigation and then begin improving working conditions. This book is a shocking look into our past, and a good read.