Kipling opens with Mowgli's wolf family and the jackal Tabaqui skulking in for scraps, and the whole book runs on that same texture of jungle law, hierarchy, and danger handled with real seriousness rather than softened for children. The verse interludes between stories (like the Night-Song here) are made for reading aloud on their own rhythm. Best for a child ready for a proper adventure with teeth in it.
About this book
First published 1894 · Written in Vermont · Adopted by the Cub Scouts
Kipling was English, but he wrote The Jungle Book in Vermont. He had married an American and settled near Brattleboro, first in a rented cottage and then in the house he built, Naulakha, at Dummerston. The stories came over his first year and a half there, and most appeared first in magazines through 1893 and 1894. The best known are the Mowgli tales, about a boy raised by wolves and taught the law of the jungle by Baloo the bear and Bagheera the black panther, with the tiger Shere Khan against him.
When Robert Baden-Powell was building a junior branch of the Scouts, he asked Kipling if he could base it on the book. Kipling agreed, which is why Cub packs are still led by an Akela and organised into wolf packs. The stories have been filmed many times, most famously by Disney in 1967, and translated around the world.
The copy on this shelf is the full original text.
Chapters
A long one: read it a chapter a night.
Public domain. Source text via Project Gutenberg, PG boilerplate removed. View the source edition