A persuasive invitation for readers to examine the impact of their consumerism.
An exposé of the garment industry’s global supply chain viewed through the lens of a pair of jeans.
Bédat, founder and director of the New Standard Institute, chronicles her travels around the world following a pair of jeans through its life cycle in order to reveal the impact of its production. Armed with extensive data and research, the author covers a lot of territory. She begins in Texas, where she spoke with cotton farmers and a wash-house owner who explained their processes and how the U.S. has shifted from a manufacturing economy to a retail economy. In fact, 98% of the clothing that Americans wear is made overseas. In China, Bédat witnessed sludge from a factory draining into a river used by local farmers. In Bangladesh, which has overtaken China as the top exporter of denim to the U.S., she describes inky black waters and mounds of industrial waste. The author toured a factory in Bangladesh, where the tension was palpable, and privately interviewed a factory worker who explained that employees are required to work at a dangerously rapid pace. In Sri Lanka, the author talked to a day laborer who revealed that sex trafficking has become a common phenomenon in garment factories. Bédat also examines the lesser-known role of the apparel broker, the middleman in the production, adding another layer of opacity to the supply chain. Back in the U.S., she toured an Amazon distribution center, and she provides an astute, depressing analysis of the impact that online platforms and automated systems have had on jobs—and landfills. On a positive note, the author offers practical advice and further resources aimed at solving these problems. Though Bédat’s personal commentary sometimes detracts from the seriousness of her message, her book is a compelling examination of an important problem that continues unabated.
A persuasive invitation for readers to examine the impact of their consumerism.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-08597-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
