Book Review: King Coal by Upton Sinclair
★★★★✩
It's been some years since I read an Upton Sinclair book so I was thrilledntonfind this on the Serial Reader app.
Sinclair's writing is straightforward, and reads contemporary to today is which made reading this one pretty great compared to older classics. His writing in this one has a sense of vibrancy and fight that I remember from The Jungle but there's a lot of grit, woe, and the exploitation as the book depicts the rigged politics that keep corporations in power at the moment expense of the low working class, in this case, immigrants who came to the US for the American dream just find themselves covered in dirt and coal dust like much of their dreams.
It was a slow start but progressed steadily and I feel that this was a better read compared to The Jungle, and like that one, Sinclair researched this topic as well but it felt like a more put together, polished if you will. The postscript at the end highlights federal documents and reports pertaining to the Colorado coal strike of 1913-14 in which the book was based from.
It's crazy how although this book was originally written in 1917, a lot of it still pertains today, especially in regards to non-unionized labor, classism, corporate greed, rigged systems and sociology.