I'm sure I can't say anything about his that hasn't already been said, so I'll stick to my personal impressions.

Stephen King says that even the villains are heroes in their own lives and he writes them that way. They might not be likeable, but you know why they do what they do. Not so here. I am a bit surprised that Steinbeck made the capitalists completely unsympathetic. Completely. Unsympathetic. Evil, in fact.

The Joads are heroic in their struggle to find work to make money to have food. They are not all likable, but I identified strongly with them, which is what Steinbeck meant for the reader to do. This is an unrelenting journey of hardship and more hardship. It's not a happy story in any sense of the word. I actually found myself starting to pray for them at one point, that's how strongly this story affected me. ;-) When Tom speaks his mind, I cheer. The only comic relief is Tom telling someone to suck it up or joking about weather predictions. There is a certain humor that comes out of people when they are at the end of their rope and it comes across here, intentional or not.

The workers' plight is made abundantly clear and sympathetic. Steinbeck wrote from his research of meeting and staying amongst people like the Joad's in labor camps, so you can believe what you're reading.

An interesting thing to me was the structure of the novel. For the most part it is told in 3rd person omniscient from the Joads' point of view. But that is interspersed with sections of a kind of overview of the situation, for example showing the used car salesmen's point of view as they put sand in transmissions so the car will seem okay for a while and sell. Steinbeck uses repetion to give these sections a poetic or lyric kind of feel. They are brilliant and give a kind of an impersonal, panorama wide angle view of things.

I give it four stars because it gives all it has to make the reader feel for the workers, but most of the characters are not really developed, which would make it a better story.

I will never forget this and I highly recommend it. These things still go on. For migrant workers (yes there still are migrant workers) and to all of us in one way or another. Please never forget that money (greed) is the root of all evil. ( )

Under depressionen drivs den fattiga familjen Joad från sitt hem. De söker sig mot Kalifornien tillsammans med tusentals andra familjer som drivits bort från sina gårdar. Väl där märker de att det är ont om jobb och att de jobb som finns är kraftigt underbetalda. Familjen Joad blir tvungna att leva i fattigdom med krossade drömmar, medan familjen splittras och löses upp.

Boken handlar till stor del om den hänsynslöshet som de rika jordägarna visar upp mot de fattiga immigranterna, men också om den samhörighet och solidaritet som växer fram bland de fattiga lycksökarna som alla har kommit till Kalifornien med drömmen om ett bättre liv.

The best book that I've ever read. ( )

A well told saga. Not the brightest times in California history. ( )

Not a book I would have picked up by myself, but as with all school books probably something I would have enjoyed more if I had? However, I have to admit reading it from a political ecology perspective was interesting: we do see a lot of the themes like land grabbing and capitalism forcing people to work for slave wages still today.

I do think some editing of it would have been nice. Hey, I'm not gonna say a nobel prize winner can't write, Steinbeck obviously does and has a way with words that on occasion even made me laugh. But dude, COME ON, your characters do not have to repeat the same statement over and over and over again, you don't need to describe fivehundred different fields just because they have different crops growing on them. Just, come on. Book could have been 1/3 shorter and still have the same plot. The between chapters setting the tone were also kind of weird to me, especially the dialogue written without markers.

The ending was also super-weird, but I guess it's meant to be open and let you imagine what happens next. I assume they all starve to death during the winter. Even so, it was a weird fucking place to end it in, if you ask me.

Title still a bit of mystery. Not a single angry grape in entire book. Very confusing. ( )