Name: The Jungle Books
ISBN: 9780451419187

Rudyard Kipling

Alberto Manguel

Alev Lytle Croutier

Presents the adventures of Mowgli, a boy reared by a pack of wolves and the wild animals of the jungle, includes other short stories set in India.

The Jungle Books

Wren Hardwick

There are a lot of differences between the book and the movie. One thing that I didn’t catch, even though it may be in the movie, is that the reason why the animals in the jungle do not want Mowgli to be there is because he is man. They cannot hold his gaze; therefore, they are not his equal and they do not like that. I don’t remember the “holding the gaze” part and I think that is completely true. With my cats and dog, I can hold their gaze longer than they can hold mine. 

When Mowgli is carried off by the Bandar-Log, the monkey tribe hated by the rest of the jungle because of their vanity and stupidity, it wasn’t just Bagheera and Baloo who went after him, but the monkey-eating snake Kaa!

Hathi the Elephant tells a story about why the tiger is striped at a meeting of the waterhole (during the drought year) and it sounds like something straight out of a Grimm Brother’s book to me. I love those kinds of stories. 

There isn’t a big fight scene with Mowgli and Shere Kan like in the movie. Mowgli is actually extremely clever with how he overcomes the tiger and solves more than one problem with the same stone.

Over all, I thought this was an interesting read. Not every story is about Mowgli, like one about a seal trying to find a place without man, one about a mongoose defending his family against venomous snakes, a man who watches the elephants dance, and a man with a variety of animals discussing military and fears; but, those about Mowgli are the most known and therefore are the ones I thought I would put in this review. 

The writing is a little harder to follow, but it isn’t impossible. It was written a long time ago, I think it was 1894, and language evolves as time does. I think it was a good one-time read for me.

The Jungle Books

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