The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck Centennial Edition (1902-2002)

There were several moments in reading "The Grapes of Wrath" where I had to set the book down and just feel the emotions that these characters were undergoing. The book resonated with me through pretty much everything I was doing in the week it took me to read it. I couldn't get the Joads out of my mind, much less the economic crisis the country was undergoing during that time period. One can be...more

There were several moments in reading "The Grapes of Wrath" where I had to set the book down and just feel the emotions that these characters were undergoing. The book resonated with me through pretty much everything I was doing in the week it took me to read it. I couldn't get the Joads out of my mind, much less the economic crisis the country was undergoing during that time period. One can be cliche and compare it to the current administration's "teeter totter-ing" budget deficit. But this novel is much more than that. John Steinbeck clearly paints the portrait of a starving country and slow demise of the agricultural loss the United States underwent during the 1930s with such poetric precision, I wept openly at several scenes. To think that close to 100 years later we are still feeling the backlash of such a mammoth event is dumbfounding. It should be criminal. Carefully weaving the plant life, the mass Exodus of migrant workers, and a single family among those migrant workers, Steinbeck provides us with a literary masterpiece that goes down in the cannon of classic fiction. That something as wonderfully moving could come out of such dispair is the bittersweet nectar that flows from the California crops these hungry hands read for. I was hungery for every word on every page. I was riveted and charged. "The Grapes of Wrath" is the stuff revolutions are made of.   hide