J is for …. Jurassic Park
I have read both of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and The Lost World. They are good and very entertaining. But Steven Spielberg took these to the next level! “Hold onto your butts.” It’s pretty rare when I love a movie over it’s book, but Jurassic Park is one. It is actually one of my favorite movies of all time, I torture my husband because we watch it so much. I just never get bored with it. My love of dinosaurs first came about after I read Dinotopia when I was a child. Love it!
Another classic novel, that should be required reading in my opinion, is The Jungle. The book was written to showcase the horrible treatment that immigrants faced at the turn of the century. “It describes the terrible working conditions in meatpacking plants, the squalid housing, the ruthlessness of employers, the sexual harassment, the lure of alcoholism and prostitution, the political corruption, the misery of life in jail. It depicts a world where honest, descent people are transformed into cogs in a huge industrial machine.”
What it ended up doing was bringing a spot light to the meatpacking industry and the completely appalling and unsanitary conditions of them. At the time the book published, Theodore Roosevelt was president and he loved to read books. He read The Jungle and felt that much of what was descibed was accurate. He ordered several investigations into the meatpacking industry and ultimately passed the Pure Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Industry Inspection Act.
