According to the law of the jungle, the behavior of wild animals can be equated with natural human instincts not only for competition and reproduction, but also for violence and exploitation. Drawing on numerous novels and cultural events at the turn of the twentieth century, The Birth of a Jungle examines how the characteristics and imagery of wild animals were evoked to explore a wide range of human behaviors, including homosexuality, labor exploitation, and the lynching of African Americans. Throughout the study, Michael Lundblad emphasizes what he terms "the discourse of the jungle": Darwinist-Freudian constructions of "the human" and "the animal" that redefined various behaviors in relation to animal instincts. With nuanced, attentive readings, Lundblad reveals how these formulations of the human animal, despite reigning critical interpretations, were often contested rather than reinforced in Progressive-Era texts. Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle" and fiction by Jack London serve as opportunities to examine changing attitudes toward sexuality and queer desire. Works like Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth and Frank Norris's The Octopus offer insights into another type of jungle: the capitalist marketplace. The real-life electrocution of a circus elephant at Coney Island and Upton Sinclair's muckraking classic, The Jungle, inform the subsequent discussion of animalized class warfare. Understandings of race and evolution are explored through the work of William James, Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes, and the role of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925. Engagingly written and cogently argued, The Birth of a Jungle reveals the significance of animality in relation to the history of sexuality, literary naturalism, and critical race studies, while highlighting how the discourse of the jungle remains a disturbing yet powerful presence in today's culture.

The Birth of a Jungle probes the historical emergence of the jungle as a discourse in the U.S during the Progressive Era.

“Readers who ignore the genius of B. Traven do so at their peril.” - The New York Times B Traven’s Jungle Novels comprises six books written during the 1930s that observe the poor conditions of the Mexican Indians living in the southern state of Chiapas, whose forced work under exploitative conditions and labor camps foment rebellion and start the beginnings of the Mexican Revolution. This last installment of Traven’s legendary Jungle novels sees the completion of Ivan R Dee’s fictional multi-volume retelling of the Mexican Revolution. From the art of guerilla warfare to the true-to-life story of the great general Juan Méndez, Traven's masterful storytelling skills are on full display. "The Jungle Novels constitute one of the richest portraits of revolution in all literature." - University Review

Essays by popular children's authors reveal the books that shaped their personal and literary lives, explaining how the stories they loved influenced them creatively, politically, and intellectually.

'Life in the Jungle' is the autobiography of Michael Heseltine, one of the most enigmatic politicians in Britain. This book tells the story of not only his political life, but of his business career as well.

The population bomb/a white one for twenty-one days, a pink one for seven/pretty baby/it's a mad mad mad mad world/meet your new family/the warehouse generation/quality time/give a hoot dont pollute/birth of a disease/I was bad because you forgot to give me my pill/teach your chidlren wrong/the feel-good school/what a difference twenty years makes/fallout from the "Movement"/majoring in "Other"/Anxiety U./monkey on our backs/the incredible shrinking paycheck/rent forever/trickling down/inside joke/the free as parents?/mixin' it up/it's a jungle out there

Morton is bored playing baseball all the way in the outfield, where the ball never, ever comes. But if he were in the jungle instead, he could be a lion or a zebra or a hippopotamus! Yeah, if he were a jungle animal, then things would be exciting. But excitement can be distracting, especially if a ball might be coming right toward him! This eBook edition of Morton's daydream adventure includes audio.

The acclaimed chronicle of the discovery of the legendary lost civilization of the Maya. Includes the history of the major Maya sites, including Palenque, Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Tuloom, Copan, and more. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Illustrated with a map and more than 100 images. In 1839, rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world’s most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood—both already celebrated for their adventures in Egypt, the Holy Land, Greece, and Rome—sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would upend the West’s understanding of human history. In the tradition of Lost City of Z and In the Kingdom of Ice, former San Francisco Chronicle journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist William Carlsen reveals the remarkable story of the discovery of the ancient Maya. Enduring disease, war, and the torments of nature and terrain, Stephens and Catherwood meticulously uncovered and documented the remains of an astonishing civilization that had flourished in the Americas at the same time as classic Greece and Rome—and had been its rival in art, architecture, and power. Their masterful book about the experience, written by Stephens and illustrated by Catherwood, became a sensation, hailed by Edgar Allan Poe as “perhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published” and recognized today as the birth of American archaeology. Most important, Stephens and Catherwood were the first to grasp the significance of the Maya remains, understanding that their antiquity and sophistication overturned the West’s assumptions about the development of civilization. By the time of the flowering of classical Greece (400 b.c.), the Maya were already constructing pyramids and temples around central plazas. Within a few hundred years the structures took on a monumental scale that required millions of man-hours of labor, and technical and organizational expertise. Over the next millennium, dozens of city-states evolved, each governed by powerful lords, some with populations larger than any city in Europe at the time, and connected by road-like causeways of crushed stone. The Maya developed a cohesive, unified cosmology, an array of common gods, a creation story, and a shared artistic and architectural vision. They created stucco and stone monuments and bas reliefs, sculpting figures and hieroglyphs with refined artistic skill. At their peak, an estimated ten million people occupied the Maya’s heartland on the Yucatan Peninsula, a region where only half a million now live. And yet by the time the Spanish reached the “New World,” the Maya had all but disappeared; they would remain a mystery for the next three hundred years. Today, the tables are turned: the Maya are justly famous, if sometimes misunderstood, while Stephens and Catherwood have been nearly forgotten. Based on Carlsen’s rigorous research and his own 1,500-mile journey throughout the Yucatan and Central America, Jungle of Stone is equally a thrilling adventure narrative and a revelatory work of history that corrects our understanding of Stephens, Catherwood, and the Maya themselves.