Rating: 
Summary: More on Target than Orwell's 1984!
Review: With "The Iron Heel," Jack London does a much better job of predicting today's world than George Orwell's book "1984." London depicts a world where government serves the business community, not the people, and there has been an incredible concentration in the ownership of the means of communication and the media. Speak out against this and the iron heel crushes you.This book is an exciting, political adventure romance that you can't put down -- as long as you get through the first 40 pages of downright boring socialist polemics. If you want to really understand where we are headed, read "The Iron Heel" it today. Hard to believe it was written in 1906.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretentious douchebags of the world, unite!
Review: You have nothing to lose but your argument! I would recommend reading this book for one of the same reasons I would recommend seeing John Carpenter's "They Live" -- to see just how utterly wrong the left is. London's story comes off as rather interesting, once you realize that people really were writing interesting things even around the turn of the last century. Imagine that?! But it suffers from the same weakness all such works do. A work of fiction, by definition, CANNOT "prove" its point! Remember, the author is the almighty deity of the realm he creates in his fiction, and therefore he can make everything in it work out to "prove" the basic premise of his subtext. Sorry, Jack, you just haven't managed to convince me of the superiority of socialism over capitalism and democracy, which even with all of their faults, still give us our best shot at true freedom -- certainly a far, far better chance than socialism ever could. No, Mr. London, I'm afraid that the Russians and the Chinese -- and the European Union -- have already shown us where the road you beckon us to embark upon truly leads. Still, the book does succeed, as one other reviewer points out, in a few small "bullseyes," but that hardly redeems the rest of this political tirade. The protagonist's arguments in the first forty or so pages of the book really only serve to show how fascist leftists can truly be given the chance (and let's just not give them the chance, okay). As the history of communism and socialism in the century following this novel's original publication goes to show, it is not only impossible to lose when playing with a stacked deck -- it's also impossible to turn out to be at all correct.
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