A provocative, important repudiation of gig-economy capitalism that proposes utopian rather than dystopian solutions.
A contrarian rebuttal of the notion that wealthy Americans deserve everything they have and that the “poor are responsible for their own poverty.”
Building on her previous book, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America, journalist Quart, head of a nonprofit called the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, dissects the notion of bootstrapping, “a shorthand term I am using to describe…every-man-for-themselves individualism.” As the author amply demonstrates, that doctrine of individualism has been a long-standing, deeply ingrained trope in American life. To demonstrate that fact, Quart examines aspirational literary works by writers such as Horatio Alger and Laura Ingalls Wilder, the latter of whom, writes Quart, painted a portrait in her Little House series of rugged self-reliance even as her father “was not such a great farmer and thus leaned on his neighbors for help far more than Wilder tended to admit in her books.” Emerson and even Thoreau are called on the carpet and found wanting, too, before Quart moves on to modern rallying cries such as the mindfulness movement, carefully instilled in corporate culture not to produce generations of Buddhist saints but instead to urge people to become more productive. Within this system, far too many people rely on a “dystopian social safety net” in order to make it from paycheck to paycheck or even to stay alive, whether visiting warming stations to keep from freezing to death in winter or free dental clinics to offset the fact that “fewer than half of American dentists accept Medicaid.” Against these harsh realities, which she reports on cogently and without rancor, Quart proposes a more meaningful safety net of cooperative work and mutual aid, whereby workers pool their capabilities and time to produce needed and sustainable things while being their own bosses—a situation that, she notes, reflects dependence, independence, and interdependence all at once.
A provocative, important repudiation of gig-economy capitalism that proposes utopian rather than dystopian solutions.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780063028005
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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