Larson’s study of the modern workplace offers touching vignettes, but an overall message is hard to find.
A colorful mosaic that spotlights our jobs, how we do them, and what they mean.
Work takes up a large part of our lives, but the broad subject of making a living can be difficult to examine. In this attempt to make sense of employment, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Studs Terkel’s seminal book on the subject, Working, Larson collects the experiences of 101 Americans who discuss their work and their opinions about their jobs. “I took a cue from Studs,” writes Larson, “who chose to not include persons with access to significant forums for expressing their views—politicians, corporate heads, and pundits, for example.” He covers an impressively wide range of occupations, including executives, hairstylists, nurses, administrators, entrepreneurs, and even funeral directors. Larson believes that massive upheavals in the idea of work are underway, driven by alienating technology, cultural changes, and economic stress. The author conducted many of the interviews during the pandemic, which gives the book a somewhat dated feel. Many contributors mention that they try to establish a connection with others through their work and that they want to believe they’re somehow making the world a better place. Significantly, several people who had retired from their lifetime occupations later took up volunteer roles to occupy their time. Other interviewees, such as those who worked for Amazon, struggled to find real purpose in what they did and felt grinding pressure to meet performance targets. In the end, the book has the classic strengths and weaknesses of the oral history genre: breadth rather than depth, diversity rather than thematic consistency. The author presents a host of interesting stories, but the whole is no more than the sum of the parts.
Larson’s study of the modern workplace offers touching vignettes, but an overall message is hard to find.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781572843332
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Agate Midway
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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