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Summary: Truly a Classic
Review: This is one of my favorite books. London combines high-seas adventure with life's lessons as I believe no one else has done before or since. We all have a little "Hump" (good) and "Wolf" (evil) in all of us, and the struggles between these two seem to reflect those we all face inside ourselves. Hoist yer topsails, mate, and get ready for an adventure!
Rating: 
Summary: Incredibly modern account of life on the high seas!
Review: No account of life at sea lacks the brutality & harshness of it; Sea Wolf, although published in 1904, is an incredibly modern account! Too often, first-person narratives are self-absorbed & self-conscious: narrator Van Wyden is that sort of person, but the narrative is not! The twin characters of Wolf Larson & Van Wyden seem to be a composite of Jack London himself!
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Summary: Jack London's best, and one of the outstanding books I own
Review: A young attorney finds the life he has always known dissappears as the coast of California disappears in the fog. He must learn to survive in a world where the police, the judge, the jury, and the executioner are in one intelligent powerful man - Capt Wolf Larson. Wolf bellows "Can you impose your rights on me?!" "No", whimpers Hump. "Then you have no rights" snarls Larson.Can Humphery Van Weyden survive?
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Summary: READ THIS BOOK!
Review: I was rummaging around in some boxes at our other farm and came across this book. It was one of the greatest finds of my life. The edition I read was from the sixties and still cost less than a dollar. I read the book in a week. Wolf Larson is Londons finest achievement. He is a man that believes there is no good in man. Just an insatiable hunger for more. This book really made me think "Hey Jack London isn't that far off the mark. Man is mostly out for himself." I don't think I could have survived under his iron rule like Van Weyden did. I would suggest this book to anyone that can read.
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Summary: An excellent drama about life
Review: I couldn't put it down. I do believe it is one of London's best. I was engrossed in the spell of Wolf Larsen, as was Humphrey Van Weyden. I constantly felt I was reading a lesson in how life can turn in an instant. The end got pretty slow but all in all it was excellent.
Rating:
Summary: Read it for class and loved it
Review: Normally when I read a book for class I only go as far as appreciating the quality of the book's prose or complexities, but I never thought of them as fun reads. The Sea Wolf was a fun read because of the thrilling adventure, which made it different from other literary books in which not a lot actually happens.
Rating:
Summary: Great book, A classic adventure.
Review: The ship GHOST is not a tramp steamer, but rather a mercantile scooner under sail power. Otherwise I loved the book and reccommend it for all
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Summary: Cherchez la Femme
Review: I first read THE SEA WOLF at age 12, 40 years ago, and thought it was terrific, for all the reasons mentioned in other reviews: the exciting sea story, the juxtaposition of the values of western civilization with those of the refined thug Wolf Larson, the growth of Hump Van Weyden into a strong and self-reliant man who can hold his own with both Larson and brute nature. When I reread it recently, I still found the basic situation on the Ghost compelling and primal. However, my reservations became stronger and stronger from the time Maud Brewster appeared until the end of the book. Jack London, the great recorder of basic conflicts between man and man, and man and nature, writes VERY unconvincingly about the relationships between men and women. Maud seems a completely artificial character constructed more as a literary symbol of refinement and whimsicality than as a human being. Some of it is ludicrous. In their escape from the Ghost, for instance, Maud and Van Weyden spend several weeks in an open boat, fighting for survival and never once performing an excretory function. They're too delicate for that. When they finally make it to a North Pacific desert island, Hump builds Maud a stone hut as shelter then, exhausted and facing the possibility of dying of exposure, sleeps outside himself. In sum, Jack London, one of the all-time greatest naturalistic writers, perpetrates a great deal of Victorian self-censorship. The symbolic scheme plays out when Larson shows up too, wrecked on the very same island somewhere in the wide, wide, wide reaches of the world's largest ocean, so Maud and Hump can witness his physical disintegration at first hand. I'm a great fan of London's shorter works, the stories of both the far north and the south seas. He is a terrific storyteller, and it's borne out in the first half or two-thirds of THE SEA WOLF. But the concluding portion of this book is a disappointment.
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Summary: So he wasn't Lucifer afterall....
Review: This is not a book that one easily forgets. True, you can read it as a simple adventure story of life on a turn-of-the-century seal-hunting schooner, but it is far more than this. It is essentially the story of Wolf Larson- and Wolf Larson is the entire mainstream of 19th and 20th century America in microcosm. Larson is no simple brute. He is, rather, a complex brute. He is a master of men and a master of the seas- but that is ALL that he is. Larson is an intelligent, driven, ruthless master of industry (in this case, seal hunting.) He has succeeded through his own abilities, hard work, and talent- or so he would have you believe. Truth is, brutal backstabbing, deception, exploitation, and disregard for the law has played an equal measure in his rise and dominance. You see, Larson believes in the rule of the jungle. He believes in it so much that he is driven to prove that this is all there is to existence. He must always seek to degrade and destroy anyone who seeks to rise above this state. This is also why he must disregard the possibility of the existence of a human soul. Larson is an intelligent, hard-nosed materialist that simply cannot conceive of anything beyond a social Darwinist hell of survival of the fittest. And Wolf Larson must be the fittest of them all. As much as money means to Wolf, it is really power over other beings- men and animals that means the most to him. Without this power to sadistically degrade and dominate others, the money would have no meaning. Ultimately that explains why he has risen to command his own vessel at all costs- he is a control freak that MUST be in absolute, totalitarian command of his whole world. This is why he only mans his ship with the lowest, most bestial types of human being, and does everything in his power to make them worse- not unlike many modern corporations. This is also why the sudden presence of a higher sort of individual, with ideals that transcend mere survival and materialism are so totally threatening to him. There are moments when one is almost tempted to sympathize with the Wolf as a champion of freedom- until you realize that in his sort of world, his "freedom" means that everyone else must be a slave. Ultimately, the Wolf meets the inevitable fate in a world ruled like the jungle. When he loses his sight and strength, the monsters that he has surrounded himself with turn on him. In the last measure there is nothing great about Larson after all, for in facing death he proves to be a petty, murdering, weakling that would rather take all those around him down with him. It seems that despite his grand pretensions, he was no Lucifer at all, but merely a sick, pathetic, sociopath incapable of making the leap into being truly human.
Rating:
Summary: First half: GREAT, last half: weak
Review: Humphrey Van Weyden, a pampered son of wealth, has lived a comfortable life of bookishness and learning in 1890's San Francisco. But everything changes when an accident on a ferry-trip across the bay leaves him floating helpless in a foggy sea. He is picked up by a schooner heading out to hunt seals, captained by the vicious Wolf Larsen. He is immediately pressed into service as cabin-boy aboard the Ghost, and learns a different kind of life than he has been raised to know. Wolf Larsen is not only brutal and overbearing to everyone he encounters, but he is also highly intelligent, having taught himself reading and mathematics. "Hump," as Humphrey is called by the Captain, gains some measure of favor with the Captain as he is able to discuss philosophy and such things of which the rest of the crew is wholly ignorant.
The characters and plot are intensely compelling, especially throughout the first half of the book where the drama is intense as he struggles to survive aboard the Ghost. His observations of the other crew members are interesting, as he discovers how different their lives are from his, and he feels pity for the things they lacked and which he took for granted. Also, the character of Captain Larsen is incredible; completely horrible yet you feel a sort of sympathy even for him.
My biggest complaint with the story is at about its midpoint where a woman character enters the story. The struggle for life suddenly takes on a different meaning for Humphrey, as he now has someone other than himself to worry about, but this changes the whole mood of the story. The struggle is no longer filled with the painful drama, but practically turns into a romance, and a fairly sappy one, at that. It's also here that the book slows down with quite a few long passages about the mechanics and technical details of ships and sailing. But overall a very interesting tale of struggle - it's just unfortunate that the ending wasn't as strong.
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