The Grapes of Wrath--A Book Review

    I have been finished with this wonderful book for two full weeks and I have tried to write this post since then and have written many words and then deleted them and then done it again and again pushed delete. Nothing, I seem to write is good enough, really gets across what I am trying to say, or says how I really feel about this book. I guess this is because I am very confident of the fact that there isn't much, if anything, that I could say about this book that you haven't already heard, read, written, been taught, etc. I will only say two things about this book:

1) As a person who tries to write and who uses the words of the English language to do so, I cannot even imagine being able to sit down over a period of time and write even a paragraph that can be found on any page within, The Grapes of Wrath.  Steinbeck transforms himself not into a writer in this book, but a true artist that the world will recognize for more time than you or I will be alive. The beauty, pain, happiness, tragedy, and raw human emotion that are expressed in this book are rare and awe-inspiring. Often times during my reading of this book, I was struck with something I cannot exactly explain about what Steinbeck was explaining and doing with the written word all while disguising it within a simple story about a family moving to California looking for work. This is a book I will add to my list of references to measure my writing against. If you haven't read this book, please do so quickly. It will not be a waste of your time.

2) The main story and stories within the main story that can be found in this book not only explain a tragic time in America's history, but explain so much of what we see so blatantly in our country and world of 2011. Our grand disconnect with the land, our unemployment, our portions of society that are deemed by economists as non-hireable, our disrespect for lower means of labor, our desire to be seen as progressive and cultured, our pleasure in tasks that are connected to the land, our desire to look to the past for the simple life and true happiness and our refusal to leave the present, our outlook of perfect employment when 4.5% of the country is still not employed and serves no purpose, the breakdown of the family, the rise of unions, our still blinded belief that progress and new tools/machines will save us from ruin, our seemingly unquenchable desire for more and more convienient and efficient ways/means to work and accomplish tasks, the tyranny of convinience, etc, etc, etc. All of these can be found in their embryonic stages in this book. It is 2011 and we are paying heavily for what occurred during the 20's, 30's, 40's, and 50's, and it is all here and Steinbeck captured it with beauty and magestic talent and did all this with paper and pencil.

I will read this book many times again and look forward to gathering all that I missed during my first read,

  David