An erudite investigation of our culture’s understanding of time.
Odell’s follow-up to her 2019 hit, How To Do Nothing.
In this rigorous, wide-ranging examination of time, the author touches on the pandemic, the climate crisis, and many other pertinent topics. Odell begins by introducing the concept of “fungible time, which “is consistent and can be endlessly subdivided. Measuring fungible time is like envisioning standardized containers that can potentially be filled with work.” The author then segues into a section on the clash between the European colonial clock hour and the understanding of time held by “task-oriented” Indigenous communities that organize their activities based on natural phenomena, such as “the flowering or fruiting of a certain plant.” Odell works assiduously to explain how our culture arrived at the commonly held belief that “time is money,” and she makes her way through an impressive array of historical documents, including the writings of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who worked on “the systematic management of other people’s time,” and ledgers recording slave labor hours in the West Indies. Ultimately, writes the author, “the origins of the clock, calendar, and spreadsheet are inseparable from the history of extraction, whether of resources from the earth or of labor time from people.” In another chapter, Odell asks what happens when this obsession with increased efficiency is turned toward the self, a point she illustrates with an entertaining discussion of “productivity bros” and their “unhealthy fixation on morning routines.” The author also considers leisure time (including its relationship to social media) and her personal experience of the pandemic, when the world experienced an “estrangement from common forms of marking time.” Odell found comfort in watching a live webcam of a nesting eagle in Iowa. This book, featuring denser prose and more academic subject matter, is not as approachable as How To Do Nothing, but it will reward readers who pay close attention.
An erudite investigation of our culture’s understanding of time.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780593242704
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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