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CUBED

A SECRET HISTORY OF THE WORKPLACE

Ferociously lucid and witty.

An editor of n +1 offers an illuminating study of the modern office and its antecedents.

Many Americans spend most of their working hours in cubicles, but 93 percent of those individuals report disliking their work environments. Yet this Dilbert-esque disgruntlement with office life is nothing new. Saval shows that from the beginning of its existence in the 19th century, cultural observers like Herman Melville and Charles Dickens considered the office a suspect space. The activities that took place there were “weak, empty and above all boring” since they lacked the dynamism of the deal making that went on in the business world they supported. At the same time, the office has also been “a source of some of the most utopian ideas and sentiments about American working life.” Through analyses of historical, sociological and cultural texts, Saval examines the double-edged promise that the office has held to American workers over the last 150 years. In the 19th century, life behind a desk offered social respectability and security while providing an apparent refuge from the physical hardships of factory work. As the business world expanded and work became increasingly rationalized for maximum output and efficiency, so did the office. This gave rise to the hyperefficient offices of the 20th century, where managing workers—down to their very movements and behaviors—as well as data and space became a frighteningly exact science. In the 21st century, technological shifts and global economic downturns have wrought still further changes in office life. Freelancers now inhabit homes and cafes, transforming leisure and living spaces into work spaces. These developments have not only stripped office professionals of the illusion of security; in a wickedly ironic, but perhaps predictable, historical twist, they have also cast them back into the “contingency and precariousness” from which the office was supposed to save them.

Ferociously lucid and witty.

Pub Date: April 22, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-385-53657-8

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 1, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Readers Vote
  • 319


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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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