An eye-opening look at today’s service work and the forms of solidarity that have emerged to meet it.
Seeing service work as “labor exploitation.”
Eighty percent of Americans today are employed in service jobs, notes McClanahan, a scholar at the University of California, Irvine. Those jobs are in turn divided into professionalized, high-paying occupations and nonprofessional, low-waged ones. McClanahan suggests that the nonprofessional jobs, specifically those in the gig economy where “workers…toil for nonhourly methods of wage payment,” are especially insidious. Gig work remains unprotected by wage laws and keeps workers, who likely identify as immigrant, non-white and/or female, in poverty. The author explores three subgroups within the gig economy—tip workers, clerical micro-task workers, and informalized gig-workers—through a historical lens, using reality TV shows, contemporary literature, and lived experiences as evidence. Modern ideas about tip work, humorously depicted in shows like Cheers and Alice, have been shaped by centuries-old attitudes toward domestic servitude and the idea that servants “accept [the master’s] pleasure” as their own. McClanahan situates tipwork’s “cousin,” clerical microwork, in the non-domestic work context of farm labor, which also faced increasing mechanization in the late-19th century. Those who produce (sometimes subversive) online poetry for pennies are just one example she offers of the “heirs” to industrial piece work and the deskilling it implies. In discussing the modern gig-work economy, McClanahan focuses on Uber drivers, especially those who have transformed their experiences into novels that deal with having “every movement monitored and logged” on the road while circulating in the world and navigating complex relationships with other service workers. Intelligent and timely, the book illuminates the often-hostile economic and cultural landscape of modern capitalism.
An eye-opening look at today’s service work and the forms of solidarity that have emerged to meet it.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781945861093
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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