Fiction
Sterling Publishing Company
March 30, 2004
Paperback
432
Action, adventure, and excitement spill from the pages ofRudyard Kipling’s best-loved collections of stories,The Jungle Books. Set in magical, mysterious India, these tales of people and animals living together--though not always harmoniously--in the world of nature have appealed equally to children and adults since their first appearance more than a century ago. Most focus on Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves. As Baloo the sleepy brown bear, Bagheera the cunning black panther, Kaa the python, and his other animal friends teach their beloved “man-cub” the ways of the jungle, Mowgli gains the strength and wisdom he needs for his frightful fight with Shere Khan, the tiger who robbed him of his human family. But there are also the tales of Rikki-tikki-tavi the mongoose and his “great war” against the vicious cobras Nag and Nagaina; of Toomai, who watches the elephants dance; and of Kotick the white seal, who swims in the Bering Sea. This edition includes both the originalJungle Book(1894) andThe Second Jungle Book(1895), written in response to the original’s enormous success.
WrensReads Review:
There are a lot of differences between the book and the movie. One thing that I didn’t catch, even though it may be in the movie, is that the reason why the animals in the jungle do not want Mowgli to be there is because he is man. They cannot hold his gaze; therefore, they are not his equal and they do not like that. I don’t remember the “holding the gaze” part and I think that is completely true. With my cats and dog, I can hold their gaze longer than they can hold mine.
When Mowgli is carried off by the Bandar-Log, the monkey tribe hated by the rest of the jungle because of their vanity and stupidity, it wasn’t just Bagheera and Baloo who went after him, but the monkey-eating snake Kaa!
Hathi the Elephant tells a story about why the tiger is striped at a meeting of the waterhole (during the drought year) and it sounds like something straight out of a Grimm Brother’s book to me. I love those kinds of stories.
There isn’t a big fight scene with Mowgli and Shere Kan like in the movie. Mowgli is actually extremely clever with how he overcomes the tiger and solves more than one problem with the same stone.
Over all, I thought this was an interesting read. Not every story is about Mowgli, like one about a seal trying to find a place without man, one about a mongoose defending his family against venomous snakes, a man who watches the elephants dance, and a man with a variety of animals discussing military and fears; but, those about Mowgli are the most known and therefore are the ones I thought I would put in this review.
The writing is a little harder to follow, but it isn’t impossible. It was written a long time ago, I think it was 1894, and language evolves as time does. I think it was a good one-time read for me.
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