An incisive look at the invisible forces of consumption shaping not just a single city, but our world.
Lessons to be learned from the history of Oakland, California.
In this expansive book, Madrigal explores Oakland’s ecosystem—from its storied past as home to longshoremen, Black Panthers, and the blues to its prospects as the epicenter of what he calls the Pacific Circuit—a “vast, powerful, opaque cultural structure” that controls the flow of consumer goods. Throughout the San Francisco Bay Area city, Madrigal says, he sees “the marriage of American capital and corporate know-how with Asian labor and technical capacity.” The book traces the rise of containerization, born of wartime need, how it links U.S. manufacturers to cheap Asian labor, and the ways it’s controlled by Silicon Valley. A journalist and author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology, Madrigal argues that it is in Oakland’s port where one can best view these economic, environmental, and cultural effects. The external costs to people and the environment, which result from the instant gratification of one-click consumption, are laid bare. One of the Pacific Circuit’s features is to siphon money from around the world and concentrate it locally. Billionaires and elite tech workers benefit. This, says Madrigal, is “the simple answer for why the Bay Area got so expensive.” Unfortunately, as he notes, “the deepest, most haunting forms of American racism work through property.” Here, he explores racial capitalism and how it has affected Black families living in the port’s shadow; the book is framed by his admiring portrait of Margaret Gordon, a community activist and former Oakland port commissioner whose “crowning achievement,” he writes, is the Maritime Air Quality Improvement Plan of 2009. Madrigal’s writing can be poetic, even when he’s examining sediment: “The mining waste fell where it would somewhere on the floor of the bay. Great dredging machines chomped and slurped up this material, and builders mixed it with whatever else was around, and it became fill. Compact it hard enough and it became land, new land, histories mixed and buried.”
An incisive look at the invisible forces of consumption shaping not just a single city, but our world.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780374159405
Page Count: 384
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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