The Jungle Book

Review by Brockeim for The Jungle Book
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Legends are made from legends. Rudyard Kipling dug deep into the tales of the jungle from his years living in India, and drew from them the kinds of stories that live forever.

“The Jungle Book” is more than how Mowgli, the man cub, learns to live and survive amongst enemies like Shere Khan. The intense mongoose vs cobra “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” also well-known, is here, as are several lesser-known and unrelated adventures.

Richly written, with details and contexts unfamiliar to Western readers, “The Jungle Book” lifts imagination and language beautifully. Poetic, and written in a literary style, it shines above most modern prose.

This is the stuff of afternoon stories read to older boys and girls. Young teens will while away rainy evenings, unwilling to part until finished. Sometimes scary and always exciting, Kipling also uses the book to teach lessons much greater than a jungle in India.

When chapters were first read to me many years ago, I listened gawk-eyed, listening intently for as long as my mother would read. I read it with different eyes now, but no less a young boy as I worry how Baloo will handle the Bandar-Log monkeys.

It isn’t perfect. A few scientific details are fudged (wolf pack breeding structure, for example), but nothing that matters in the big picture. Kipling will have you in the palm of his hand, even though it was first published over 100 years ago.

May “The Jungle Book” by Rudyard Kipling be as amazing to you as it has been to me.

–Brockeim

Review by T. Simons for The Jungle Book
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This collection is probably the single best starting place for reading Kipling, especially for younger or teen readers (though the very youngest would probably enjoy his _Just So Stories_ more). These stories are great reads, enjoyable by all ages.

Fans of the movie will find a more complex work here — not “darker,” but more ambiguous; the three stories from this collection that have generally been adapted into other media, and that most readers think of when they think of “The Jungle Book”, focus on outcast human infant, Mowgli, who is abandoned as an infant in the jungle and raised by wolves, and primarily tell the story of his search for a “place” within the wolf pack, the Jungle, and the human world, and his outsider status in all three realms. Perhaps because they focus almost entirely on the Indian jungle, or perhaps because they’re aimed at children, these stories are also largely free of the undertone (overtone?) of imperialism that runs through much of Kipling’s work for adults.

It has, of course, been massively influential on later writers, from Edgar Rice Burrough’s _Tarzan_ to Neil Gaiman’s _The Graveyard Book_. The various morals contained within the “Mowgli” stories were also taken as a motivational book within the Scouting movement (reading this helped me understand why I had to memorize “Akela” when I was a cub scout).

While only three stories in this collection focus on Mowgli, Kipling did write a second collection, “The Second Jungle Book,” which is almost entirely comprised of Mowgli stories, and which I would highly recommend if you like these tales. If you want to read more of Kipling’s work for adults, I’d recommend either “The Man Who Would be King” or the short story collection “Plain Tales from the Hills,” both of which should be available for free online.

As to formatting of this kindle edition: there are blocks of Kipling’s poetry in between the stories, some of which was difficult to read as the formatting had not carried over well to this Kindle edition. Not a critical issue, but Kipling’s poetry is excellent and the formatting errors were annoying.

Review by for The Jungle Book
Rating:
This is amazing. It really is worth your time. I am 14 and I am forced to read “Classic Literature” by my dad. In my opinion, reading classic literature is a chore. This book is definatly an exception. I had a hard time putting this book down.. It is enticing, exciting, insightful and a book worth reading.