"The Grapes of Wrath" a book worth "lookin at."

I have just finished "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck. I will work up this post as soon as I can. A book well worth reading and thinking deeply about.

08/23/2008
Well, enough time has passed. What about this book? When I read it I knew I was in the presence of a great writer. It took some time to get used to the dialect that Mr. Steinbeck used when his nomadic characters were speaking to each other. But, given some chapters and a commitment to the book those idiosyncratic elements became as natural as breathing. When that happened I was "in" the book not reading it. The thirties were very difficult years. America was tested as were the people of faith. My parents lived as young people at that time and it was the Great Depression that brought them to Chicago where my life began. Some went west, some east, and my grandparents went north.

The story is about the common man, the uncommon man, how the common man so often does uncommon things. It is about government failing its population, a percentage of its population fail another. It is about classism, racism and it is most about fear. Mr. Steinbeck's work spotlights the nobility that man is capable of and this nobility is often manifested in tragic times. It is also a clarion call to be willing to evaluate the past and present for the failures and act positively on them. It is not all right to maintain the status quo when others suffer so greatly. How should a just society work?

The final scene of the book is a shocker. A young woman whose husband has abandoned her in her last months of pregnancy gives birth, in the presence of her faithful mother and a loving stranger, to a still born child. That child, like Moses of the Exodus, is set adrift on a river, this time dead and in a river caused by a terrible flood, a message to those who would hear and understand. She discovers that she is in a barn where a young boy is watching his father starve to death because the father has sacrificed everything he has so his son might live. What the young girl does...you will have to read the book. But, if you do, don't skip to the end. Breath the book, the dust, in.