Successfully avoiding academic-ese, Loomis delivers a jargon-free, clearly written history.
A fresh history of American labor and the strikes that resulted from companies’ mistreatment of workers.
In each chapter, labor historian Loomis (History/Univ. of Rhode Island; Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe, 2015, etc.) discusses the specifics of a strike followed by a section of context about the broader issues in American society undergirding the unrest. The author begins with the women laborers in the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, who fought terrible factory conditions, during strikes in 1834 and 1836. Refreshingly, Loomis includes the resistance of African-American slaves as a labor-management issue, a topic that constitutes the second chapter. “By walking away from the plantations,” writes the author, “withholding their labor from masters who increasingly could not control them, the slaves undermined the southern economy and morales.” Loomis continues chronologically, ending with the rise of service-worker unions starting in the 1980s, groups that consisted mostly of blacks, Latinos, and new immigrants. Many of them labored in restaurants and hotels, but the movement sometimes went by the catchy name of “Justice for Janitors.” Some theories of government state that those elected to exercise power should protect the exploited. The author generally agrees, but he also explains how both federal and state governments almost always side with employers, usually to the detriment of employees. In the modern era of strikes, President Ronald Reagan smashed the union of air-traffic controllers, who actually served as his own employees. The anti-union fervor of Reagan and others has meant a precipitous decline in organized labor unions in numerous industries, leading to deepening wage inequality, job insecurity, and social unrest. Each chapter of this well-told saga could stand on its own, and the author broadens the value of this primer/well-documented advocacy tract with an appendix that briefly describes 150 significant moments in American labor history.
Successfully avoiding academic-ese, Loomis delivers a jargon-free, clearly written history.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-161-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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