The Grapes of Wrath

By: John Steinbeck

Narrated by: Dylan Baker

Length: 21 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's Summary

The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers.

At once naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck's, The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps the most American of American classics. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation during the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. From their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of this new America, Steinbeck creates a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, tragic but ultimately stirring in its insistence on human dignity.

©1939 John Steinbeck (P)2011 Penguin

Wish I could give it 10 stars!

I don't give many 5 star ratings. I listen to too many books to be impressed by many of them but I honestly wish I could give both this book and this narrator 10 stars. They were perfectly matched and I did not want this story to end.
Like most people of my generation (mid 60's), I read this book in high school and found it boring and didn't like it at all. It is wasted on the young who haven't faced any hardships in life yet and they can't possibly understand the impact of it's lessons.
But now when I listen to it I can feel the dust in my throat and the bugs biting my skin and the heat beating down on me. I know the pain of the parents watching their children starve and the humiliation of the men , especially, who could not take care of their families.
And, I could see how we as a country are starting to repeat those same mistakes that culminated in the massive poverty of the majority of Americans in those years.
This is a must read for all adults.

28 of 30 people found this review helpful

Every Character a Gem!

What made the experience of listening to The Grapes of Wrath the most enjoyable?

I felt as if I lived the pain and the sorrow of The Joad family. In this trek from Oklahoma to California i traveled and suffered with these people. The way Steinbeck weaved hope, despair and the struggle of the human spirit for something better into this story places him in a class by himself

What other book might you compare The Grapes of Wrath to and why?

Night by Elie Wiesel, The Canterbury Tales, The Painted Bird

Which scene was your favorite?

I enjoyed the introduction of Tom Joad. When the trucker picked him up and started to talk to him he knew right away he was being sized up. Having just been released from prison, he was edgy, truthful and proud and wasn't going to be looked down upon. The dialogue and characterization in this scene brought his character to life as the hopeful hero.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

From start to finish each one of the characters, because they were so well formed and realistic, evoked empathy but never to the point of pity. Every character bore their share of hardship. You walk away from this experience feeling stronger for having been in their company. These were people to be admired.

16 of 17 people found this review helpful

Wonderful Tale Punctuated with Loud Harmonic Licks

Would you listen to The Grapes of Wrath again? Why?

Yes, the story is wonderful. The narrator is excellent and does a great job with all the character voices. He seems to be channeling Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, for he sounds just like him.

Any additional comments?

Overall the book was wonderful except for the jolting harmonica music transitions from each chapter that were so loud I had to turn down the volume. I absolutely HATED that. I appreciate that the tunes were of the period and the instrument would be easily carried on the road. But it doesn't work for me and spoiled an otherwise wonderfully written and narrated story.

20 of 23 people found this review helpful

Pleased

I've literally waited 5 years for this audio to be released of what is hands down the best piece of American literature ever written. I think the pace and clarity of the narrator is perfect. It does have odd, blunt interludes of harmonica music that can snap you out of the trance the book puts you in, but other than that its a pretty flawless rendition of an American Classic.

23 of 28 people found this review helpful

Almost more relevant now than when it was written

Any additional comments?

Replace farmers from Oklahoma with migrant workers from Mexico and I doubt you'd be able to tell that this novel was written back in 1939. And that's what really stuck me about this novel - how relevant it still is - in some ways even more now than then.

The first similarity is economic. As I write this we are still either going through a 'great recession' or are slowly emerging from an economic downturn. The causes are different, of course, here in the novel it was bad farming techniques mixed with new technology that drove the farmers from their land. Today it's an over-saturated housing market - people banking all their futures on the bubble of hope that perhaps the value of their own home will increase enough for them to make a tidy profit. And just like land that's been worked too hard, people worked the housing market too hard and it collapsed. Banks came to take the farms in the novel and banks came to take the homes in our own time.

And both examples were of people running as fast as they could just to stay a little ahead of disaster. The farmers grew crops that destroyed the soil because they had no choice - they couldn't compete with the new farms, the corporate farms and machine efficiency. A family can't compete with a fleet of harvesters and tractors - working the land by hand can't keep up with a tractor. And the same goes for the people with houses these days. Everybody borrowed on cheap credit from the bank to hopefully 'buy low' and then 'sell high', but when everyone does it then there isn't no value in any of it and it all falls apart and everyone still owes the banks. And all they wanted was a piece of a dream, a chance to stay afloat economically, to send their kids to a good college, to make the car payments, put food on the table.

In the novel the Californian's hated the Oakies, called them lazy, called them animals, called them thieves; in today's world we call the homeowners who lost it all idiots, greedy, lazy. But we also hate the banks. Call the banks greedy, inhumane, a great machine that's too big to die and too big to fail and everybody has to keep feeding it because nobody is really too sure how to control it anymore.

But there is one difference, and that's the work. When the people lost the value on their homes, when the banks realized that the amount of money in the economy was based on a weak speculation and that there was actually a lot less money than there really was, when that caused credit to dry up, and when that caused smaller businesses to close up because they couldn't run the businesses with no credit, which in turn caused people to lose their jobs, and that caused the economy to drag down deeper and created a vicious cycle that made it worse and worse - after all that, the people had nowhere to go because all the 'poor jobs', the type of work Steinbeck writes about in the novel had all been taken by the immigrants.

And that cussed more issues. The poor American middle-class blamed the Mexican's and now militia patrol the borders to kick the Mexican's out or do worse things in the desert at night when nobody is looking. A man like Casey in the novel is no different than a immigrant getting killed by some militia border patrol.

And that causes resentment on all sides and the center can't hold.

And that's just the economic similarity between the novel and today's times. Politically it's the same too. A conservative will say the poor just gotta work, but the conservative will also be on the side of the businessman and when everyone needs work, the businessman can keep wages down and in turn keep the poor really poor. But that's supposed to be ok because the conservative will say the poor can take help from a charity or a church - but that's easy to tell someone else when it's not you having to beg and take charity, easy to tell another man to beg. But the conservative man is holding on by a thread as thin as can be too and he's causing his own demise because soon the corporation will put him out of work too, his job will be lost and he'll have to go begging and he won't be so mean and conservative anymore. He'll see the value of sticking by your fellow man instead of blaming him for his troubles.

And that's what the book is about - about family, about sticking together, about helping, about not letting the fruit on the vine rot when others go in need. And that's why it's an even more radical novel today than when it was written because it 'smells' of Communism or of Socialism. And the conservative man doesn't want to hear about that, he doesn't want a union because union men are lazy and he doesn't want socialism because the government will tell him what to do and he doesn't want communism because he can take care of his own family.

That is until he can't, then he'll be singing a different tune or he'll be turning on his own people like some of the people in the novel who turned against their own just to put food on the table; the great selfishness.

That's the saddest thing about the book - how spot on Steinbeck was about human nature. And for as beautiful as the novel is, as well written as it is, nothing can compare to how true it is. And maybe that's the thing that makes people still so angry about it - that it reveals a truth we don't want to accept about ourselves, that deep down we know that they way we live, that the American dream is not working, that it never really worked and that we either side with the people who will toss us on the heap of irrelevance or we fight the powers that be. And maybe if we worried a little more about if their neighbor has enough in his bowl and a little less about if we have enough in our own then maybe things would be better.

The novel is a microcosm of American, then and now. And that's quite an achievement because how many novels ring this true 75 years after they were written? And the novel is a damning indictment too, and that's why it still scares people.

And that ending. What an ending too. It's both hopeful and sad. It's religious and it turns religion on it's head too. It's bleak and yet it's also comforting.

Now I didn't realize it at first, but this is the third in a series of books I've been reading that deal explicitly with society - 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom' talked about a people fighting for their independence in the deserts of Arabia, '100 Years of Solitude' about a village coping with modernity, and now this novel about a country having to find a new direction. And they are also about the poor, about people who have been taken advantage of by a government or an economy and have been cast aside. And that's been a struggle since man understood ownership and it will continue to be a struggle as long as some men side with the very forces that could steamroll everyone in the end.

'Don't turn on your own kind', Tom says. Well I hope Tom is still somewhere out there keeping an eye on everyone, helping where he can, beat up and bloody but still fighting. The world needs more Tom's and more Ma's. Someone's gotta keep the family together.

Anyway, brilliant novel. Pure genius.

31 of 39 people found this review helpful

Excellent performance, gripping novel

This was a truly eye-opening book about the dust bowl and the great migration to California and all that immigrants had to endure and try to survive. It was heart-breaking and yet uplifting at the same time. The narrator did an excellent job.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Go West, and Suffer

John Steinbeck’s gripping novel about the Joad family’s trek to California, fleeing the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, is a Pulitzer-winning American classic.

That’s partly because Steinbeck’s powers of description are without equal. The first chapter alone is worth the price of admission, as he describes how the spring rains fell, and the crops sprouted green, and the countryside came alive.

And then the rain just stopped coming.

The Joads and thousands like them endure the unbearable, aching agony of having nothing and losing everything; not just scant possessions, and not just land, but land consecrated with the blood and sweat of generations.

Some of Steinbeck’s recitations—of the stops along the route west, for instance, or the steady invasion of vermin into the dark corners of abandoned sharecropper shacks—have the power and cadence of the narration in “The Plow that Broke the Plains,” the 1936 documentary by Pare Lorentz that chronicled the genesis and relentless advance of the Dust Bowl.

The novel is a portrait of a people—simple, optimistic, hardworking, bewildered by a changing world all around them. They are surprised to hear themselves called “Okies,” a derisive term used by the landowners who need their labor but fear their strength in numbers. The characters are richly drawn. Of the family’s strong, careworn matriarch, Ma Joad, Steinbeck says, “It was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.”

The road west is a long and bitter one. The family struggles to hold together its jalopy and itself in the face of hardship, defections, and death. Every glimmer of hope is crushed by despair; more suffering, abuse, and deprivation. In the end, the rains that forsook them in Oklahoma return to ruin them in California. The Joads are left hungry, penniless, decimated—and somehow still optimistic. There’s no other choice.

Whether intentional or not, narrator Dylan Baker sounds a lot like Henry Fonda, who starred in the acclaimed film version. He delivers a wide range of characters fluently, with an overall tone that is just slightly weary and entirely appropriate.

Personally, I could do without the gratuitous harmonica music between chapters. The book didn’t need it, and it’s a distraction from the exquisite writing.

8 of 10 people found this review helpful

Perfect performance

Dylan Baker is so good that he actually sounds like Henry Fonda. This performance is outstanding.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Fantastic

Great Story, Great Performance. Must not miss out on! This is my favorite so far!

5 of 6 people found this review helpful

Don't Miss This Classic!

I put off listening to this book for quite a while after getting it on sale. I knew it was a well-rated classic that I really wanted to read. My reluctance, however, was due to the fear that it might be outdated, slow moving, or even boring. Oh how wrong I was!

Listening to Dylan Baker's awesome narration of Steinbeck's masterpiece, it felt like I was carried away to a different time and place. Each character had their own particular voice--it was hard to believe there was only one narrator.

I was always engrossed in the story, I learned much about a period in our history that never caught my attention before, and I felt very sad as I followed the Joad familly's desperate plight for survival.

Steinbeck's writing style made it so easy to visualize the story and the characters. I felt like I was immersed in their lives, almost a fly on the wall. I really cared what happened to each and every one of them. And finally, I was prepared for an abrupt ending, but that brought quite a surprise. I wasn't sure I believed my ears. It was totally unexpected and will remain with me for a long time to come.

Highly recommended book! Don't procrastinate. Jump right in!

2 of 2 people found this review helpful