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Book Summary: Blood Diamonds

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Bloods Diamonds was a rollercoaster book in which there were times you felt the excitement and other parts of the book it was more factual making it a bit dry. One of the attention-grabbing moments for me was in chapter four when the author speaks about the usage of mules to transport and deliver the units of diamonds to the Liberian border. I never would have imaged that people will literally walk for over two hours back in forth to deliver diamonds to another country! The would supply the Liberians with the diamonds in return the Revolutionary United Front will be supplied with guns. The massacre that occurred in March 25, 1997 deeply grieved my heart when Revolutionary United Forces and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council massacred people …show more content…

I was a bit surprised of the difficulties that Campbell experience to gain access to visit a diamond mining area. The author had to go the extent of pretending to be government contractors in order to enter the area. The description of the workers in the mining areas to find diamonds created a picture in my head of slaves working in cotton fields. The workers were forced to work from sunrise to sunset with no breaks and there only form of payment was two cups of rice and wage that corresponds to fifty cents (U.S dollar). I content that the other briefly described the process of how the worker looked for diamonds because I had no prior knowledge of how to extract a diamond. A noteworthy observation Campbell gathered was that there was no main difference between a government owned mine and a mine controlled by rebels other than the lack of guns. I would think if a government owned mine would take the necessary actions to instill proper working conditions for the miners. Unfortunately, this revealed to me the lack of governmental power and its care for the citizens of their country. Throughout reading Blood Diamonds it makes you question is the cost of materialistic items worth more than rights of

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War, Labor, and Capitalism Reflection Upton Sinclair wrote a novel in 1906 titled, “The Jungle”. The book focused on the harsh working conditions of immigrants in the United States. Sinclair wasn’t the only person who focused on and exploited companies with horrendous working conditions - Emma Goldman was a young, outspoken feminist who was jailed many times for her speeches calling out the upper class. One of Goldman’s more famous speeches is titles, “Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty” (1908) (Zinn 270).

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Corruption runs rampant in Packingtown, the town where Jurgis and his newly immigrated family work in the meatpacking industry. The Jungle’s heavy-handed symbolism alludes to the theme of corruption. For example, the animals represent the workers themselves; while the workers are the cattle, “each in a separate pen … leaving them with no room to turn around,” the wealthy capitalists are the “‘knockers,’ … watching for a chance to deal a blow” (Sinclair, 39). In other words, the capitalists are taking the workers lives

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Upton Sinclair is recognized today as one of the most influential writers during the birth and largest period of industrialization in America: The Industrial Revolution. He is known most by his incredible, life-changing novel, The Jungle, which was written and published in 1906. The book was written to explain the amount of power and control that big businesses had during this era over the average workingman. “The novel’s story of the destruction of an immigrant Lithuanian family by the forces of corporate greed and poverty is a tale of horror almost beyond tragedy”(1110). Throughout the novel, Sinclair shows a series of unfortunate events that the Lithuanian family encounters once they move to America in hope of finding a life of living the “American Dream.”

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Thus, Sinclair’s purpose of writing The Jungle failed to bring readers to advocate for the rights of workers trapped in the low wages, unsafe working conditions, and long hours of meatpacking factories, but rather, succeeded in opening the country’s eyes to the meatpacking practices that went on behind closed doors and the establishment administrations to protect the public from these unscrupulous

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