In the Category of
Children's Literature Team Discovery Channel is proud to select:
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Published 1903
This book was given to me for, I think it was my eighth birthday, in a beautiful cloth-bound and illustrated edition which I still own. It was one of the first novels I ever read and the first book where I cried when it ended. Not that it's a particularly sad ending - it's not particularly happy either - but it is a deeply cathartic experience.
One would be hard pressed to find a better writer about the relationship between dog and man than Jack London.
From Wikipedia:
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The Call of the Wild is a novel by American writer Jack London. The plot concerns a previously domesticated and even somewhat pampered dog named Buck, whose primordial instincts return after a series of events finds him serving as a sled dog in the treacherous, frigid Yukon during the days of the 19th century Klondike Gold Rushes.
Published in 1903, The Call of the Wild is one of London's most-read books, and it is generally considered one of his best. Because the protagonist is a dog, it is sometimes classified as a juvenile novel, suitable for children, but it is dark in tone and contains numerous scenes of cruelty and violence..
London followed the book in 1906 with White Fang, a companion novel with many similar plot elements and themes as The Call of the Wild, although following a mirror image plot in which a wild wolf becomes civilized by a mining expert from San Francisco named Weedon Scott.
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Quotes from the book:
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"Here was neither peace, nor rest, nor a moment's safety. All was confusion and action, and every moment life and limb were 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."
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"His muscles had wasted away to knotty strings, and the flesh pads had disappeared, so that each rib and every bone in his frame were outlined cleanly through the loose hide that was wrinkled in folds of emptiness. It was heartbreaking, only Buck's heart was unbreakable. The man in the red sweater had proved that."
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