Upton Sinclair: The Lithuanian Jungle--Upon the Centenary of The Jungle (1905 and 1906) by Upton Sinclair (On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom ... Freedom, & Moral Imagination in the Baltics)
TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home (Free subscription) | 12 hours ago
I’ve started out Thanksgiving Day with a little sacrilege—by Amazon standards, anyway. The left image shows a page from Google’s PDF of The Jungle, the Upton Sinclair novel exposing the Chicago meatpackers. My little experiment was for more than the sake of curiosity. Google has digitized zillions of titles that you may not be able [...]
Deus Ex Malcontent (Free subscription) | yesterday
Last month while in Washington D.C., I ate at a place on Capitol Hill called Founding Farmers. If you live in the D.C. Metro area you're probably, at the very least, familiar with the restaurant and if you'd like I can give you a minute to stop salivating. Yeah, it's that good. Founding Farmers's claim to fame is that it's a certified "green" restaurant, which means that in addition to closely...
freecounterpoint (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
Yeah, right. As Upton Sinclair once said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”
Green Mountain Daily - Front Page (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
Crossposted at Huffington Post. Tomorrow is independent journalist Dahr Jamail. - Christian The bonds established between mothers and children are sacred. Mothers provide unconditional love, caring and support, teaching their children to live in the world with a sense of purpose. But life circumstances oftentimes get in the way of relationships and affect the outcomes for better or for worse. In times...
TED BURKE, like it or not (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
Steinbeck is of the generation that arrives just after the Muckrakers,Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, who thought that fiction was something of a sociological/anthropological tool in getting at the skewed relations between races and classes in a capitalist economy. Some larger truth, discovered by a focus imagination, could get beyond supposition and provide the correct vision for reform....
Recently Banned Literature (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
California Classics The Creative Literature of the Golden State by Lawrence Clark Powell The Ward Ritchie Press Los Angeles (1971) [click to enlarge] Works and authors discussed: Anza’s California Expeditions , by Herbert E. Bolton; The Journey of the Flame , by Walter Nordhoff; Death Valley in ’49 , by William L. Manly; The Land of Little Rain , by Mary Austin; The Wonders of the Colorado...
And So it Goes in Shreveport (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
The mail, on an almost daily basis. One copy of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." One stuffed football from Mardi Gras. One corner of a down filled Woolrich blanket. One lavender throw pillow. The corner of an oak bookshelf. Numerous socks. Four pairs of shoestrings. One dog bed. One iPhone Jam Jacket (iPhone, thankfully, unharmed). One Joshua Chamberlain biography. One pair reading glasses....
Inveresk Street Ingrate (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
One for the Party archives? Abstract propaganda front and centre in The Merry Frinks , a madcap comedy from 1934. And there was you thinking that the Hays Code was enforced in 1934 because of Mae West's single entendres and Joan Blondell showing a bit of thigh. How wrong you were. Jack, Harry and Daryl apparently viewed Utopian Socialism as more dangerous than Upton Sinclair during this time period....
Dolphin Hotel (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
Admittedly I've never thought of global money markets on any terms other than Upton Sinclair's - "Fascism is capitalism plus murder" - but I'm still struggling to work out how the Northern Rock good bank / bad bank is actually supposed to work. Does one half smile encouragingly, build up rapport by offering you cigarettes and keep bringing cups of over-sweetened tea while the other sits backwards...
Civil Commotion (Free subscription) | 10/27/2009
Publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle followed its serialization in a socialist newspaper by almost 18-months, delayed because of nearly irreconcilable differences over content between Sinclair and the publisher. The book has never since gone out of print and, though a novel, it is universally and deservedly recognized as one of journalism’s heroic achievements. He [...]
TofuPunk.com | That One '08 (Free subscription) | 10/27/2009
HBO’s Rags Time is a documentary about the history of New York’s garment district. Parts of it look like they were produced by Upton Sinclair. Meet your happy, well-paid garment workers:
Food &Health Skeptic (Free subscription) | 10/25/2009
The "Smart Choices" the U.S. Government Wants To Make For You The short summary: Food makers have combined to work with nutrition experts to develop standards to brand food products in such a way as to communicate that the products comply with the government's dietary guidelines and widely accepted nutritional standards. A large number of manufacturers have joined one such program, "Smart...
TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home (Free subscription) | 10/17/2009
How’s this for a litany of Wall Street sins and other financial crimes? Stock market manipulation. Insider trading and related pump-and-dump schemes. Use of friends and relatives to provide corporate services. Monopolies and ruthless crimes against rivals. Lethal corner-cutting in the areas of worker safety and defense contracting. Corruption of newspapers. In The Money [...]
But I digress... (Free subscription) | 10/15/2009
When I was in the 10th grade, I took Advances American History with one of the best teachers I ever had in public school. Her lessons were creative and enlightening and often fun. She is one of the inspirations I cite immediately when people ask why I am so good at dealing with teenagers. Anyway, one of the units we covered was Labor Unions (and for a 37 year-old to still remember her Sophomore history...
They gave us a republic (Free subscription) | 10/14/2009
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. ---Upton Sinclair, US novelist & socialist politician (1878 - 1968) There are few sights more heartbreaking than that of abused humans desperately defending their abusers. PIKEVILLE - Coal miners who were given the day off work, caravans of environmentalists, businessmen and local politicians and...
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