Best Selling Books by Rudyard Kipling

The Jungle Book is a collection of stories by English author Rudyard Kipling. The tales in the book are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to give moral lessons. The verses of The Law of the Jungle, for example, lay down rules for the safety of individuals, families and communities. Kipling put in them nearly everything he knew or "heard or dreamed about the Indian jungle." Other readers have interpreted the work as allegories of the politics and society of the time. The best-known of them are the three stories revolving around the adventures of an abandoned "man cub" Mowgli who is raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. The most famous of the other stories are probably "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", the story of a heroic mongoose, and "Toomai of the Elephants", the tale of a young elephant-handler.

A dozen stories answer children''s questions about how the camel got his hump, the rhinoceros his skin, the leopard his spots, how writing began, and other concerns.

The weather door of the smoking-room had been left open to the North Atlantic fog, as the big liner rolled and lifted, whistling to warn the fishing-fleet. "That Cheyne boy''s the biggest nuisance aboard," said a man in a frieze overcoat, shutting the door with a bang. "He isn''t wanted here. He''s too fresh." A white-haired German reached for a sandwich, and grunted between bites: "I know der breed. Ameriga is full of dot kind. I dell you you should imbort ropes'' ends free under your dariff."

The Jungle Book key characters are Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves and Sher Khan, biggest tiger in India. As Baloo the sleepy brown bear, Bagheera the cunning black panther, Kaa the python, and his other animal friends teach their beloved man-cub the ways of the jungle, Mowgli gains the strength and wisdom he needs for his frightful fight with Shere Khan, the tiger who robbed him of his human family. But there are also the tales of Rikki-tikki-tavi the mongoose and his great war against the vicious cobras Nag and Nagaina; of Toomai, who watches the elephants dance; and of Kotick the white seal, who swims in the Bering Sea.

The story of Kimball O''Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, who spends his childhood as a vagabond in Lahore. With an old Tibetan lama, he travels through India, enthralled by the ''roaring whirl'' of the landscape and cities of richly colored bazaars and immense diversity of people. Creates a vision of harmony - and of India - that unites the secular and the spiritual, the life of action with that of contemplation.

From Longman''s Cultural Edition series, Rudyard Kipling''s Kim, edited by Paula M. Krebs and Tricia Lootens, sets Kipling''s most important novel in both its imperial and its literary contexts. Ever since its publication in 1900, Kipling''s story of British India has catalyzed fantasies and debates over colonialism and imperialism. Through a series of selections from Kipling''s poetry, travel writing, autobiography--and, crucially, his work as a young journalist--this edition offers students and teachers new ways of reading the tale of how the young streetwise Kim, "Little Friend of All the World," becomes both a Buddhist holy man''s disciple and a British spy.