The Iron Heel

By: Jack London

Narrated by: Darla Middlebrook, Mike Vendetti

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

Spectacular Steam Punk

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.

Odd speech

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.

Great story, terrible production and performance

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

Brilliant argument against oligarchy, okay...

... 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.

Where did London get these thoughts in 1907?

Intriguing that London, living on the west coast frontier as well as traveling in Alaska would write such work. Much of it reminded me of Trotsky's work. This story is told from a young woman's diary found after communist uprising. I did not like the narrator. She sounded like her nose was plugged up.

I decided to listen to this book after it was sourced as inspiration for 1984, Brave New World, and We. Now I am interested in figuring out who/what (besides Marx) influenced London's thinking.

Socialist Dogma

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

A weakness in London’s portfolio, performed abysmally

The narration here is so painfully bad that it’s difficult not to be mean-spirited in commenting upon it. Suffice it to say that nearly every page is marred with mispronunciations and syntactical speaking glitches. The female narrator’s attempts at male voices are the most grating example of “vocal fry” that I’ve ever heard. If I were not committed to finish the book as a book club assignment there’s no way I would’ve continued to the end.

On the substance of the language and narrative this is my least favorite Jack London. Maybe, in the context of his time, it was more politically and socially noteworthy but, having been eclipsed by a hundred subsequent works of similar theme, I found nothing of either especially current nor especially lasting interest in it.

Tedious

A pompous and pseudo intellectual book about a pseudo intellectual character. The narrator didn't have much to work with. The result is hair pulling boredom.

Terrible narration.

This is a great book but I couldn't make it through the audio book due to the narration. When it's not flat and boring it's practically slurred in an attempt to sound "male."