The Call of the Wild by Jack London

Synopsis: The book starts out in 1897 on a ranch in Santa Clara, California. Buck is stolen from his home and family, and sold into service as a sled dog into Alaska. He is half St. Bernard, and half shepherd. He becomes more primitive and wilder, and is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs and becomes a leader in the wild. He meets John Thornton who nurses him back to health after getting into a fight, and Buck grows to love him, but is also conflicted because he is torn between the affection for him and the wild where he feels he truly belongs.

After Thornton is killed, Buck is angry and devastated and kills several Native Americans to avenge Thornton, and then goes back into the wild, and after fighting and winning against a hostile wolf pack, he becomes the leader of the sled dogs.

Some of the major themes I noticed in this book were of survival and strength in the harshest of circumstances and of nature vs. nurture.

Review: “There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life can rise.” And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when is one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.”

“Far more potent were the memories of his heredity that gave things he had never seen before a seeming familiarity; the instincts which had lapsed in later days, and still later, in him, quickened and become alive again.”
Once Buck left civilization, he lost all the previous memories he had of his previous life and fully adapted to his environment and became wilder.

“He had done this thing before, somewhere in that other and dimly remembered world, and he was doing it again now, running free in the open, the unpacked earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead.”

“The blood-longing became stronger than even before. He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.”

By being the strongest dog in his environment, Buck survived when the other dogs were not able to.