A well-argued, eye-opening look at the dark side of globalism, and those who win and lose because of it.
An exposé of how the quest for profit put a once-iconoclastic tech company into the orbit of a totalitarian regime.
Founded in 1976 in Silicon Valley, Apple once prided itself on building its own hardware and software, eventually offshoring some manufacture to Ireland and Singapore. Then, writes Financial Times correspondent McGee, came the advent of “contract manufacturers” in places like South Korea, Mexico, and China, the last of them characterized by an irresistible-to-capitalists competitiveness built on what one Chinese scholar calls “low wages, low welfare, and low human rights.” That image does not square with Apple’s “think different” branding (or, for that matter, its iconic 1984-themed ad of old), but Apple has long relied on China as not just a source of production but also a huge market, earning the company, by McGee’s account, some $70 billion a year. Apple has also trained huge numbers of Chinese engineers and fueled a homegrown computer and phone industry that in effect was built on its intellectual property. The flow of cash goes both ways; McGee writes that Apple spent so much money in China—by the company’s reckoning, to the tune of $55 billion a year by 2015, but possibly much more—that over time it has become “the world’s biggest corporate investor” in the country. Under Xi Jinping’s rule, Apple’s freedom of market movement has been curtailed, yet the savings in labor and materials keep the company captured there in the technical sense, even as Apple tries to placate the government by blocking virtual private networks (VPNs), restricting the use of AirDrop “after it emerged that Chinese citizens were using it to organize,” and otherwise bowing to the Chinese Communist Party. To no avail, McGee suggests: Apple is likely to come to an unhappy end in China as its chief domestic rival, Huawei, outstrips its market share, while Donald Trump’s trade wars may harm its bottom line in the near term.
A well-argued, eye-opening look at the dark side of globalism, and those who win and lose because of it.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9781668053379
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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