Reviews for Jimmie Higgins

The average rating for Jimmie Higgins based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-05-11 00:00:00 Stephen Kanzee Upton Sinclair schafft es mal wieder meisterlich, das Leben der Menschen in Amerika um die Zeit des ersten Weltkrieges anschaulich darzustellen anhand des Lebens von Jimmie Higgins. Upton Sinclair war ja ein großer Verfechter des Sozialismus, dies wird in diesem Buch wieder stark thematisiert. Dies vielleicht als einziger Kritikpunkt, da es doch stark in den Vordergrund rückt. Ansonsten ist es wieder ein tolles Buch, in dem man viel über das Land und die Menschen zu dieser Zeit erfährt.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-09 00:00:00 Andreas Ruckes "You could not be indifferent to the war, you could not be of two minds about it. And yet--Jimmie Higgins was of two minds! He wanted to beat back the Huns, who had made all this fearful mess; but also he wanted to beat the profiteers who were making messes at home." I think a lot of Americans don't realize just how tumultuous the beginning of the 20th century actually was. Anarchism, socialism, labor unrest, rapacious imperialism, military buildup - and Jimmie Higgins is dead center in the middle of it. This "bowed, undernourished little man" meets presidential candidates royalty, incites strikes wherever he goes, loses everything multiple times - it's exhausting, really, but damn engaging. This is the most complex novel by Sinclair that I've read. I love Sinclair and I'm a socialist myself but he often strikes me as naive, if not willfully so. This novel seems to reflect Sinclair's attempt at reflecting the world back to itself through the eyes of an eagerly devoted proletarian idealist. Imagine Forrest Gump as a devoted working class agitator in the 1910s and you're probably not even close - my favorite Upton Sinclair novel, by far.