My favorite book

    I think this is not something new that I love Harry Potter so much. I love Harry Potter books and films at the same time, but to be honest I prefer to read than to watch them. But today I decided to talk about something different.

So about 1 or 2 weeks ago I read a really touching book, about which I will write.  I would like to talk about “People of the abyss” book by Jack London. The book is about life in the East End of London in 1902. The events occur in 20^th century, but I think it has some similarities with today's reality. The time passes but the government isn’t changing. They’re only different by their names and that’s all. You can think that this is just a story about London’s life, but I have fond our country in it. Now, the most important think is that Jack London has decided not to get information from a third person about their lifestyle, he decided to become one of them. The title of the book is  “People of the abyss”. Who are they? They’re just people who live in the East End of London. The East End used to be the poorest part of London, but now it is changing really fast. One day Jack London had decided to go there and live with them. His relatives were against to that idea, but Jack was too decisive man.

The book is divided into chapters. It has 27 chapters. And each of chapters begin with the words of some famous person. At the beginning till the end Jack describes haw that families were surviving.  Jack London says there were 1,292,737 people living in London in 1902 who were living in households with incomes of 21 shillings per week or less. He did some sums to work out how a family of five would spend their  money. He wrote the costs out in dollars, because he was writing for an American readership, and used an exchange rate of $5 to £1. Commodity US$ UK£ shillings+pence Rent 1.50 0.3 6,0 Bread 1.00 0.2 4,0 Meat 0.875 0.175 3,6 Vegetables 0.625 0.125 2,6 Coals 0.25 0.05 1,0 Tea 0.18 0.036 0,8.5 Oil 0.16 0.032 0,7.75 Sugar 0.18 0.036 0,8.5 Milk 0.12 0.024 0,5.75 Soap 0.08 0.016 0,3.75 Butter 0.20 0.04 0,9.5 Firewood 0.08 0.016 0,3.75 Total 5.25 1.05 21,0 21 shillings a week works out at £54 and 12 shillings a year. The book says that there would be many families with more than five members, and that there would be times when the main breadwinner would be unemployed, sick or otherwise unable to work. Then the family would be desperate.

At the end of the book, the author draws parallels between the Innuit tribe living in Alaska and the English civilized people. If we compare ordinary man living in Innuit  with ordinary Englishman then we will see that the life of the Englishman is more cruel than the life of Innuit . The Englishman always has fuel, clothing and clothing, and the second is never secured by them. It turns out that civilization was not able to provide an ordinary Englishman as much as the man in Innuit, but it is said that civilization is developing human productive forces. There is only one answer - the useless governing mechanism. There is only one way to get out of this situation. It is necessary to make civilization serve ordinary human interests.