A trenchant critique of neoliberal capitalism that offers pointed remedies.
A political journalist examines the assault on liberty at the hands of profit-seeking entities from Amazon to Zillow.
Ahmari opens with a series of stories in which Russian, Chinese, and Iranian workers are subjected to indignities ranging from being blacklisted to unemployability to being required to attend a Putin speech or lose a day’s pay. None of the events happened in those countries, he reveals, but instead in the U.S., where workers were required to attend a Trump rally and some seeking safer working conditions wound up unemployed. In theory, we freely consent to such abuse via the employment contracts and service agreements we sign. That consent, writes the author, serves as “the fig leaf covering over the sheer power of private individuals and entities to coerce us as consumers, workers, and citizens.” The manipulation of working hours as a means of enforcing precarity is just one tool, but corporations have many more, including the fact that state governmental authorities are “prone to capture by narrow, private cliques and class interests at the expense of society as a whole.” The dismantling of more or less protected or relatively high-paying work by the wreckers of private equity is largely protected by at-will laws and an ethos that if a worker doesn’t like it, they can just get another job. As Ahmari shows, no corner of the economy is safe. For example, much of the work of rural firefighting and medical care is now controlled by private companies, most news sources are in the hands of monopolies, and most big firms—a case in point being the Sackler opioid empire—have the wherewithal to shop for judges who permit them to act without consequence. All this adds to “a political crisis that therefore requires a political solution”—one that has yet to materialize.
A trenchant critique of neoliberal capitalism that offers pointed remedies.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780593443460
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown Forum
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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