The Iron Heel Audiobook By Jack London cover art

The Iron Heel

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Jack London, famed for his tales of adventure, was also a science fiction writer only rivaled in his time by the great H. G. Wells. The Iron Heel is a dystopia that would, in part, inspire George Orwell's masterwork, 1984. The Iron Heel tracks the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States of America - and the doomed attempt to counter it. It is a novel more relevant today than it was in its day. Hear the "tale of capitalist oppression" that George Orwell couldn't stop thinking about.

Public Domain (P)2013 Darla Middlebrook Classics
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I loved this book! Who would have guessed? Jack London writing dystopian science fiction on par with Jules Verne and H. G. Well. I loved the Battle of Chicago with its bomb-dropping balloons and gun battles between skyscrapers. The book is fresh like The Handmaid’s Tale. Entirely inventive. The dual narration works, too. I would recommend this gem.

Spectacular Steam Punk

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The combination of poor production and terrible performance makes this interesting story barely listenable. sad

Great story, terrible production and performance

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The speech patterns are odd and someone's iPhone "dings" in chapter 3.
The dual narrator is very off-putting and distracts from the story.

Odd speech

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... at best, novel.

Calling this a novel of ideas might be a misnomer, because I'm not sure there's a novel here. The characters resemble mouthpieces for political views more than they do real people. I understand the value of this book. Were it not for The Iron Heel, perhaps 1984 wouldn't have been written. So it's worth a read/listen in regards to its influence on Orwell and others. Isolated, taken solely on its on merits, I can't say it was a satisfying read.

Brilliant argument against oligarchy, okay...

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Not Jack London's best. More Wishful-thinking than a novel. and Easily the worst reading performance ever.

Socialist Dogma

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