by Louis Hyman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 21, 2018
A quietly hopeful spin on an economic process that has proved tremendously dislocating for a generation and more of workers.
A revealing study of the “gig economy,” which, though it seems new, has long antecedents.
Speaking in the middle of a major recession, an entrepreneur named Elmer Winter told an audience of business executives that the complacent world of lifetime employment and job security would soon come to a screeching halt, the victim of rising labor costs and the need to compete globally. Winter’s speech, Hyman (Economic History/Cornell Univ.; Borrow: The American Way of Debt, 2012, etc.) slyly notes, came not in 2018 but in 1958, at the beginning of an era in which corporations began to transform into cash conduits meant to funnel quarterly dividends into the hands of shareholders rather than building carefully with an eye to the long term. In that scenario, the old values of workforce stability and risk minimization gave way to a different way of doing business, one in which layers of temporary workers were as important in commerce as adjunct faculty would become in academia. A principal driver in the transformation was the electronics business, which, as it morphed into the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, needed to be able to hire on the spot, let people go when demand slacked, and otherwise be nimble enough to change product lines quickly. Hyman, who writes engagingly, observes that this is not necessarily good nor bad; it’s just as it is. However, he does foresee trends that may improve conditions for consultants, freelancers, and temporary workers: Disintermediating technology will allow workers to position themselves in the marketplace. “Right now we are too fixated on upskilling coal miners into data miners,” writes the author. “We should instead be showing people how to get work via platforms like Upwork and Etsy with their existing skills.” Provided, one assumes, that Etsy is recruiting coal miners….
A quietly hopeful spin on an economic process that has proved tremendously dislocating for a generation and more of workers.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2407-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
by Bonnie Tsui ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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by Bonnie Tsui ; illustrated by Sophie Diao
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