A book review: Oil! by Upton Sinclair

I have just about finished reading Oil! by Upton Sinclair.

This the book that the movie There Will Be Blood is supposedly based upon.

First, the book has almost no resemblance to the movie at all.

I don’t know why Paul Thomas Anderson didn’t just call it an original screenplay and take full credit for it.

Even the names are mostly changed. Some of the places are similar but the similarities stop there.

The book is a long, long overblown treatise on Socialism, Communism, government corruption and greed based in the early part of the 20Th century.

The point of worker exploitation is made early and often. And then made again and again and again and again……………

This is one of those books that I cannot wait to finish I so bored with it.

Dad in the book, who I suppose is meant to be some kind of villain, is actually a pretty fair minded person and generous to a fault.

His spoiled and narcissistic son is a good kid but blown about by every wind that comes his way.

Other characters are lifeless and not fleshed out.

This is another example of a so called “classic” book that may have been something sensational in 1927 but is a big bore in 2009. Like The Great Gatsby, another horribly boring book.

Unlike other great books from the past there is very little here that is instructive or enlightening about the human experience.

I did not know and was never taught in school that there was an American troop deployment in Northern Russia at the end of WW I. that was interesting and I intend to find out more about that.

The only other thing I am getting out of this book is the almost alien thinking of 80 or 90 years ago and this may only be Mr. Sinclair’s opinions.

Don’t buy this book unless you are an insomniac like me.