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Title: Nice descriptions of Montery Bay area and little else.
Review: Nice descriptions of the Monterey Bay area where the book takes place and very realistic characters is about all you'll get from this work of Steinbeck's. What's missing is a story. The main focus is on the efforts of some bums to do something nice for Doc, a kind but lonely marine biologist who was apparently based on Steinbeck himself, but the book meanders from that plot line through stories about a Chinese grocery man, a quasi-French painter, a slightly bats housewife, a madam and her suicidal pimp, among many others. The only thing they really have in common is where they take place. They are all largely boring. And then in the end, you do indeed wonder what the point was. THIS is a classic?
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