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Oil!

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About this listen

 As he did so masterfully in The Jungle, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Upton Sinclair interweaves social criticism with human tragedy to create an unforgettable portrait of Southern California's early oil industry.

Enraged by the oil scandals of the Harding administration in the 1920s, Sinclair tells a gripping tale of avarice, corruption, and class warfare, featuring a cavalcade of characters, including senators, oil magnates, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist. Sinclair's glorious 1927 epic endures as one of our most powerful American novels of social injustice.

©1954 David Sinclair (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Classics Historical Fiction Fiction Socialism Russia

Critic reviews

"Sinclair's 1927 novel did for California's oil industry what The Jungle did for Chicago's meat-packing factories." ( Library Journal)
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Bunny Ross is conscientiously ethical, intelligent, inquisitive and likeable. Among his friends are some very poor and some badly oppressed people whom he admires and loves greatly. He’s the only-son of one of America’s first oil magnates. He rides the California oil boom of the early Twentieth Century and the bitter class war of Bolshevism at the same time … and experiences the exquisite torture of a deep personal investment in both sides. This book is a long, slow, heart-aching march into the valley of the shadow of death. It’s a brilliantly written longitudinal case study of personal morality for one who has both money and influence. Truth and right go one way, Dad and expectations go another. I’ll say it again : brilliant.

Brilliant Historical Geo-Politico-Economic (better than I’m making it sound)!

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Read the book a few years back, this is a great story, well read here.

Brilliant

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Wonderful but very different to the film as much more about politics. Still relevant today

Wonderful but very different to the film

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