A poignant and triumphant tale of a great creature in the wild. He feels the bitterness and savagery of men and his pack, there has been a dividing line in his relations with humans by no fault but their own due to their constant usage of this canine Buck in work, in pulling in the snow, they have not shown any kindness, but there is hope he will soon be blessed with some.
One man shows a kindness that helps Buck, who has had a life of toil and enduring of hardships, its a warming to the heart to see man and animal bonded in humility and kindness.
Humans can be cruel and unkind to each other, and many guilty of worser crimes to animals in the wild and those under their control as a pet, they are more vulnerable and have no voice.
Jack London here has given them a voice in this story and White Fang.
He has successfully placed us in their point of view, in the shoes of the main protagonist Buck.
An inspiring story that will continue to last through time.
Jack London is another author that I recently hold high up there in the sphere of great writers, he writes with great insight into the world, the behaviours, the human condition and here the animal dilemma.
I read this story way too late in my life, I only wished that I learned of these great stories of his when i was in my youth.
This story has revived for me the importance of justice and kindness to the animal kingdom and the freedom to an animal of the wild.
Joe Lansdale an author, I have praised many times due to his similar storytelling of great human stories and wonderful character creations, recommends this author and has said in an interview that Jack London had inspired him in his youth as a writer and I can now see why.
If all this is not enough reason to read this or to remind one of its greatness, then read what the author E. L. Doctorow said in his preface of this story...

"Man and dog are here together put back into prehistory, one of the moments of metaphorical abutment in which the book abounds. The law of the club and the law of the fang are one and the same, which is to say that in this primeval life of nature man and dog are morally indistinguishable-the call of the wild calls us all. We are dealing in this instance with not a literal dog but a mythopoetic thesis.

It is perhaps his fatherless life of bitter self-reliance in late-nineteenth-century America that he transmutes here-though this is not the way it does us any good to read it. It seems more relevantly his mordant parable of the thinness of civilisation, the brutality ready to spring up through our institutions, the failure of the human race to evolve truly from its primeval beginnings. It derives from Jack London's Marxism the idea of the material control of our natures, and from his Darwinism the convictions that life triumphant belongs to the most fit. This is not a sweet idea for a book, it is rather the kind of concept to justify tyrannies and the need of repressive social institutions to keep people from tearing themselves to bits. But London's Nietzchean superdog has our admiration, if the truth be told. For as grim as its implications are, the tale never forgets its sources as a magazine frontier romance. It leaves us with satisfaction as its outcome, a story well and truly told. It is Jack London's hack genius that makes us cheer for his Buck and want to lope with him in happy, savage honor back to the wild, running and howling with the pack."

Now for some great paragraphs from this story.

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“Bucks first day on the Dyea beach was like a nightmare. Every hour was filled with shock and surprise. He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilisation and flung into the heart of things primordial. No lazy, sun-kissed life was this, with nothing to do but loaf and be bored. Here was neither peace, nor rest, nor a moment’s safety. All was confusion and action, and every moment life and limb was in peril. There was imperative need to be constantly alert; for these dogs and men were not town dogs and men. They were savages, all of them, who knew no law but the law of club and fang.”

“And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations feel from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut and slash and the quick wolf snap. In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks. They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been his always. And when, on the still, cold nights, he pointed his nose at the star and howled long and wolf like, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stillness, and the cold, and dark.
Thus, as token of what a puppet thing life is, the ancient song surged through him and he came into his own again; and he came because men had found a yellow metal in the North…”

“The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under the fierce conditions of the trial life it grew and grew. Yet it was a secret growth. His newborn cunning gave him poise and control. He was too busy adjusting himself to the new life to feel at ease, and not only did he not pick fights, but he avoided them whenever possible. A certain deliberateness characterized his attitude. He was not prone to rashness and precipitate action; and in the bitter hatred between him and Spitz he betrayed no impatience, shunned all offensive acts.”

“All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men out from the surrounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to kill-all this was Buck’s, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm blood.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the solider, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.”

“It was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were aware of it. Each day rose earlier and set later. It was dawn by three in the morning, and twilight lingered till nine at night. The whole long day was a blaze of sunshine. The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life. This murmur arose from al the land, fraught with the joy of living. It came from the things that lived and moved again, things which had been as dead and which had not moved during the long months of frost. The sap was rising in the pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds. Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping, crawling things rusted forth into the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers were booming and knocking in the forest. Squirrels were chattering, birds singing, and overhead honked the wild fowl driving up from the south in cunning wedges that split the air.”

“This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a sense of duty and business expediency; he was to the welfare of his as if they were his own children, because he could not help it. And he saw further. He never forgot kindly greeting or a cheering word, and to sit down for a long talk with them (gas he called it) was as much his delight as theirs. He had a way of taking Buck’s head roughly between his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck’s, of shaking him back and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy. And when, released, he sprang to his feet, his mouth laughing, his eyes eloquent, his throat vibrant with unuttered sound, and in that fashion remained without movement, John Thornton would reverently exclaim, “God! You can all but speak!”

“The blood longing became stronger than ever before. He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survived. Because all of this he became possessed of a great pride in himself, which communicated itself like a contagion to his physical being. It advertised itself in all his movements, was apparent in the play of very muscle, spoke plainly as speak in the way he carried himself, and made his glorious furry coat if anything more glorious. But for the stray brown on his muzzle and above his eyes, and for the splash of white hair that ran midmost down his chest, he might well have been mistaken for a gigantic wolf, larger than the largest of the breed. From his St. Bernard father he had inherited size and weight, but it was his shepherd mother who had given shape to that size and weight. His muzzle was the long wolf muzzle, save that it was larger than the muzzle of any wolf; and his head, somewhat broader, was the wolf head on a massive scale.”

“There is a patience of the wild-dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself-that holds motionless for endless hours the spider in its web, the snake in its coils, the panther in its ambuscade; this patience belong peculiarly to life when it hunts its living food; and it belonged to Buck as he clung to the flank of the herd….”
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It has brought about three adaptations to film
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http://more2read.com/review/the-call-of-the-wild-by-jack-london/

The Good:
This is an old story (as stories go) about a domestic dog kidnapped from California and shipped to the Yukon to spend the rest of his days starving, freezing and dragging a sled. The prose is fancy, but in a good way – the protagonist’s humanity and heroism are shown with full force, and the setting is both beautiful and terrible. The ending is perfect.

The Bad:
My only criticism is that this wasn’t about a cat.

'Friends' character the protagonist is most like:
Buck is a primal force of nature but also an innocent child. He has great hair too. He is most like Rachel.

Harika bir kitaptı teşekkür ederim London☺️

I read The Call of the Wild when I was quite young and remembered it by a general impression rather than any exact detail. The details are stunning, and prove to be evidence that London had experienced the cold, the isolation and the dogs first hand. It is a remarkably moving tale about the loyalty and wildness of the dog. Buck is so wonderfully described that he becomes real for you immediately. I cringed at the mistreatment and the overwork; marveled at the inexplicable trust and love he is still able to offer; and felt the echoing call that beacons to his ancient roots and his wild nature.

He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.

At times this is not a pleasant book to read. The dogs are mistreated by man, and then they are also vicious to one another. It is realistic and it is survival of the determined and strong, but it is a sad part of the canine nature and one that might not exist in a kinder environment but is essential in Alaska during the gold rush.

Jack London understands nature, even her cruel side, and his works always make me feel I am in a wilderness full of majesty and beauty and perhaps one step away from losing my life. The argument can be made that this is where the canines belong and this is the life we have stolen from them by pulling them in to sleep by our fires. There is a freedom here that seems worth the price.

Buck was wildly glad. He knew he was at last answering the call, running by the side of his wood brother toward the place from where the call surely came. Old memories were coming upon him fast, and he was stirring to them as of old he stirred to the realities of which they were the shadows. He had done this thing before, somewhere in that other and dimly remembered world, and he was doing it again, now, running free in the open, the unpacked earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead.

“He was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken. He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot it. That club was a revelation. It was his introduction to the reign of primitive law, and he met the introduction halfway. The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused.” Jack London, The Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild (aka "Unbroken" with dogs)

I couldn't remember if I read this or "White Fang" in high school, but I know I read one of them (maybe both!) In any case, since I couldn't remember I decided to revisit this classic via audio book.

I don't usually read "adventure" stories, but found much appreciation for this tale, especially as it was told from the perspective of a dog, Buck, who was kidnapped from a California farm and sold to traders during the Alaskan gold rush to be worked as a sled dog. Modern readers may have a hard time reading (or listening) to the literal dog-eat-dog conditions and depictions of animal cruelty.

While written about dogs, I found the whole tale to be an allegory of the human experience. How and why a person can behave like their most primitive self when forcefully removed from the comfort of home; how a being relates to unconditional love instead of force and punishment; and the far-reaching implications of ineptitude.

4 stars.

Did I like this book?
Not really, no!

Do I regret reading it?
No, this is one of those books that you simply cannot not read!

So why didn't I like this book?
Honestly, I can't put my finger on it. Normally I should've loved this book. I love doggos. I love classics. And I enjoy these types of books. But for some mysterious reason The Call of the Wild did not work for me. Buck was a great doggo and I loved the way Jack London wrote from a dog's POV without making it too far-fetched. I mean Buck was a real ass dog! And I appreciated that. But for me, the book was underwhelming and I really just didn't care! And I don't enjoy a book I don't care about.

Nevertheless, I still plan on reading White Fang and see how that goes.

Bellísimo libro.
London logra trasmitir sentimientos y emociones con un lenguaje en apariencia simple.

Buck, un perro, transita su camino el cual es su herencia. Siente la llamada de lo salvaje.

Así como éste pasa de la civilización a la barbarie, el ser humano también.
De ahí la identificación con los protagonistas.

A classic book with an interesting story!
Buck, a large St Bernard mix, is gently raised as a pet. He’s treacherously stolen, sold, and eventually becomes a sled dog. Buck has a series of owners and adventures. His struggles to survive the brutal conditions develop his wilder instincts.

This is an old-fashioned book with long sentences and poetic descriptions. “With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance . . . this song of the huskies was more the pleading of life.” Buck is stirred “by the howling ages.” Eventually he’s torn between a life he understands and the primeval call of the wild. It's very well written!

’During the four years since his puppyhood he had lived the life of a sated aristocrat; he had a fine pride in himself, was even a trifle egotistical, as country gentlemen sometimes become because of their insular situation.’

When Buck is kidnapped from the California estate where he’s lived with Judge Miller, his days as a pampered pup come to an end, and ends up in what must seem like another world, the Klondike, where he must adapt in order to just survive, and push himself to the limits in order to push himself to the limits in order to determine his limits.

’There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.’

Set in the late 1890’s, The Call of the Wild is the story of life, man’s need to master nature, and all that he believes falls under his domain.

Like many others, I'm sure, my first encounter with Jack London was through Disney's beloved 1991 classic movie Wolfsblut (or White Fang) starring Ethan Hawke. I fell in love with the rough and wild landscape as well as the dog portraying the halfbreed.

This is "the other story" Jack London wrote about a dog. It's a novella, technically, but like the novel that he's now known for the most, this also tells of the wild north, of snow and ice and of a hard life.

We meet Buck, a dog living in the United States with a family that is fairly well off. The gardener has a gambling problem so he leads Buck away and has him kidnapped to be sold. Ever since the Gold Rush started, strong dogs are in ever increasing demand and Buck (being half Collie and half Saint Bernard) is definitely strong.
Thus, Buck ends up in Canada, going through the hands of several owners.
Despite his strength, he has a lot to learn since this is quite a different life from what he's used to.
He's delivering mail, gets beaten, survives attacks, stages coups, almost gets killed and even finds love.

While many of Buck's experiences throughout the story are based on some of the philosophies with which the author was grappling while writing The Call of the Wild, Buck himself was based on a real dog. When London first arrived in Alaska in 1897, he became the tenant of two brothers, Marshall and Louis Whitford Bond. Their dog made an immediate impression on London, for they shared the name Jack (I can say with absolute certainty that the dog would have made a lasting impression on me for a totally different reason).


(Here is Jack the human with Jack the dog.)

The dog was a St. Bernard-Collie mix, as Buck would be in London's novella. In a letter London wrote to Marshall Bond in 1903, he explicitly states, “Yes, Buck was based on your dog.”

What got to me while listening to none other than Pablo Schreiber narrating this story, was the intense descriptions of the magnificent landscape most of this story takes place in (the cold, the wind, the snow, the danger come spring, the hunger and physical pain), of the human stupidity, of the stark contrast between the environment Buck grew up in and the one he later grew to actually love, of the hard work these people and dogs had to perform, of the life in the wild and how not everyone is cut out for it (and what happens if you don't heed advice). It's clear that London knew what he was talking about, having seen and experienced most of what he was writing about for himself and it makes all the difference.

An enchanting story full of harshness but also unexpected tenderness. Just like the wild it depicts.

This is one of those rare classics that requires no effort to read and no sophistication to enjoy. The story follows the classic outline of a Bildungsroman, except instead of a man we have a dog, and instead of growing up he becomes feral and bloodthirsty. The bare outline of the story is brutal; yet London’s rhapsodic prose makes the transformation from pet to wild animal seem liberating.

In a way it is, of course; and perhaps Buck is happier with wolves than with lawyers. Still, I am not sure what moral, if any, we are to take from this. London was no preacher of atavistic Darwinism, but an avid socialist; yet this book makes me want to throw off my clothes and run into the forest. If the author wanted to make the point that nature a cruel world, red in tooth and claw, why did he make Buck’s transformation so attractive?

All moralizing aside, it is a thrilling book. I was given a version in Spanish, and so ended up reading the story through the screen of translation. Even so, it was totally gripping. Doubtless London is guilty of a fair bit of anthropomorphizing in his characterization of Buck. If he had not done so, I doubt the book could have been half as compelling. Nevertheless, I found London’s description of life from a dog’s point of view convincing enough to start looking at dogs differently. The little poodles in the park began to take on a savage and sinister aspect. I will be more careful going forward.

I guess it's important to remember that this isn't just a socialist fable: it's also a book about a dog. That's certainly all I thought, when I was ten and I read and re-read this for the first several times. I just really liked dogs, and we couldn't have one, so I read a lot of books about them. Here's a book about Buck the Yukon sled dog. His bond with his human is so strong that they'll perform miracles for each other. That scene with the thousand pound sled is like the Rudy-sacks-the-quarterback of dog stories.

Now, as a grown up, I finally get to have my own dog, and he likes to point his ass right at my face. He’s between us in bed at this very moment, his head buried down in the blankets, ass up. It’s my wife, then my dog's butt, then me.

But socialism. After being about a dog, it's - actually the second thing is it's dark, holy shit. People are like here, kid, here's a book about a dog, kids love dogs, and ten-year-old me cracks it and it's all "He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang. He sniffed the bodies curiously. They had died so easily." When they're not hunting the most dangerous game, dogs keep getting slashed open to the bone or starving piteously to death. Jack London spent some time grubbing for gold in the Yukon wilderness himself - and he was awful at it, so he knows from hardship.


Jack London

So the third thing is that London also happened to be a socialist, and as an adult it's hard not to read Call of the Wild as an allegory. You could hardly find a better socialist allegory than a team of sled dogs, right? Everyone harnessed together, running together to pull a mighty load. They grow to love it so much that when one dog gets sick he pulls a Boxer. Buck starts the book as a pampered bourgeois and finishes it as a pack animal.


Here's Blair Braverman, the face of modern dogsledding and quite a good tweeter.

London also brings in a healthy dose of naturalism, the then-fashionable (now obvious) idea that the environment shapes character. And there's a great deal of somewhat confused Darwinism: London, like lots of other people, has confused evolution for memory, so Buck keeps having dreams about Neanderthals. There's some yikesy stuff about women and minorities, not definitely offensive but you get the idea that if you got him going it'd be definite eventually. (I've heard that it was indeed.)

So you see why sometimes you have to remind yourself that this is a book about a dog. It's about a brave dog running in the wilderness. I remember how wild and romantic it seemed to me, when I read it as a child. Now I read it to my dog. Does it awaken, for him too, some wild and romantic memory? Does he hear the faint echoing of that primordial call? He sighs deeply, from under the covers, and farts.