The Jungle Books II: Book 2

Rudyard Kipling

Feb 2008 · Recorded Books · Narrated by Patrick Tull

About this audiobook

" The great panther leaped as a kitten leaps at a dead leaf whirling overhead, struck left and right into the empty air that sung under the strokes, landed noiselessly and leaped again and again, while the half purr, half growl gathered head as steam rumbles in a boiler. ' I am Bagheera-- in the jungle-- in the night, and my strength is in me. Who shall stay my stroke?'" -- from " Letting in the Jungle" For Rudyard Kipling, the jungle was at once a fierce and an infinitely gentle place. The Noah' s Ark assortment of animal characters that populate his stories are endowed with personality and temperament-- their human counterparts are not difficult to recognize. Even Mowgli, the wolf-child, is secondary to the magnetism and allure of the jungle and its exotic creatures. Part Two includes the following stories: How Fear Came; The Law of the Jungle; The Miracle of Purun Bhagat; A Song of Kabir; Letting in the Jungle; Mowgli' s Song Against People; The Undertakers; A Ripple Song; The King' s Ankus; The Song of the Little Hunter; Quiquern; Angutivun Tina; Red Dog; Chil' s Song, The Spring Running; and The Outsong.

About the author

Kipling, who as a novelist dramatized the ambivalence of the British colonial experience, was born of English parents in Bombay and as a child knew Hindustani better than English. He spent an unhappy period of exile from his parents (and the Indian heat) with a harsh aunt in England, followed by the public schooling that inspired his "Stalky" stories. He returned to India at 18 to work on the staff of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette and rapidly became a prolific writer. His mildly satirical work won him a reputation in England, and he returned there in 1889. Shortly after, his first novel, The Light That Failed (1890) was published, but it was not altogether successful. In the early 1890s, Kipling met and married Caroline Balestier and moved with her to her family's estate in Brattleboro, Vermont. While there he wrote Many Inventions (1893), The Jungle Book (1894-95), and Captains Courageous (1897). He became dissatisfied with life in America, however, and moved back to England, returning to America only when his daughter died of pneumonia. Kipling never again returned to the United States, despite his great popularity there. Short stories form the greater portion of Kipling's work and are of several distinct types. Some of his best are stories of the supernatural, the eerie and unearthly, such as "The Phantom Rickshaw," "The Brushwood Boy," and "They." His tales of gruesome horror include "The Mark of the Beast" and "The Return of Imray." "William the Conqueror" and "The Head of the District" are among his political tales of English rule in India. The "Soldiers Three" group deals with Kipling's three musketeers: an Irishman, a Cockney, and a Yorkshireman. The Anglo-Indian Tales, of social life in Simla, make up the larger part of his first four books. Kipling wrote equally well for children and adults. His best-known children's books are Just So Stories (1902), The Jungle Books (1894-95), and Kim (1901). His short stories, although their understanding of the Indian is often moving, became minor hymns to the glory of Queen Victoria's empire and the civil servants and soldiers who staffed her outposts. Kim, an Irish boy in India who becomes the companion of a Tibetan lama, at length joins the British Secret Service, without, says Wilson, any sense of the betrayal of his friend this actually meant. Nevertheless, Kipling has left a vivid panorama of the India of his day. In 1907, Kipling became England's first Nobel Prize winner in literature and the only nineteenth-century English poet to win the Prize. He won not only on the basis of his short stories, which more closely mirror the ambiguities of the declining Edwardian world than has commonly been recognized, but also on the basis of his tremendous ability as a popular poet. His reputation was first made with Barrack Room Ballads (1892), and in "Recessional" he captured a side of Queen Victoria's final jubilee that no one else dared to address.