#142 in Adventure
The Call of the Wild
- 128
- Pages
- about 2.5 h
- Reading time
- Film 2020 +8
- On screen
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Our view
London tells the whole story from the side of a dog, Buck, and never lets him think like a person in fur. Stolen from a ranch and worked in a Klondike sled team, he stays an animal, and that restraint is the book’s strength: in little over a hundred pages it says much about instinct, hardship and what civilisation covers over. The cruelty is unsoftened, worth knowing before giving it to a young reader.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Call of the Wild is an adventure novel by Jack London, published in 1903 and set in Yukon, Canada, during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The central character of the novel is a dog named Buck. The story opens at a ranch in Santa Clara Valley, California, when Buck is stolen from his home and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively more primitive and wild in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primal instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild.
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen 9 times — from 1923 to 2020.
- FilmThe Call of the WildIMDb
- FilmThe Call of the WildIMDb
- FilmThe Call of the WildIMDb
- FilmCall of the WildIMDb
- FilmThe Call of the WildIMDb
- TV filmThe Call of the Wild: Dog of the YukonIMDb
- TV filmThe Call of the WildIMDb
- SeriesCall of the WildIMDb
- TV filmCall of the WildIMDb
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.5 across 834 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 85% of the weight and the score stays at 7.5 — the Adventure average of 7.8 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.9 | 82 | 10% |
| Hardcover | 7.4 | 752 | 90% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Call of the Wild?
It has 128 pages — shorter than 100% of the ranked books in Adventure.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Adventure — with scores between 7.3 and 8.1, closest to this book.
