Dragon's Teeth I

"Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure- such is the strange alchemy of the spirit." So writes Upton Sinclair near the conclusion of Dragon's Teeth (Part 2), reflecting on the cycles of history. However, it is hard to read through this, the third chapter of Sinclair's World's End series, and find much pleasure at all in these human agonies- even three quarters of a century after the real world backdrop of this book takes place. In July 2005, Julie Salamon wrote a piece for The New York Times, wondering what happened to these works of Upton Sinclair. Coincidentally, I happened to be in the middle of Dragon's Teeth (Book 2). While reading her thoughts on the books (and Sinclair's character, Lanny Budd), I agreed with her that these are books that should not have been forgotten, as they have been. Sinclair's utilization of fiction to tell the story of a true world history is risky, but effective. And while there are many reasons to read these works (or at least Dragon's Teeth), none is perhaps as powerful as the need to remember that wars, atrocities, torture, propaganda- all those things that are detriments to civilized society- that they do not happen in the abstract. They manifest in the lives (and deaths) of people. And as we are living in the world where human beings are facing agonies, are we too soon rationalizing them into some perverse pleasure? Before we too quickly translate agonies into the stuff of lore, perhaps it is time to prevent those agonies from occuring in the first place. Perhaps this can happen so that no authors need write fiction based in truth like this again. [This review is of both Dragon's Teeth Part 1 and Part 2]