An interesting tale of personal fulfillment, as a sedentary journalist proves she can hack it on the factory floor of a General Motors plant, but one that provides disappointingly little insight into the larger issues confronting workers in today’s global economy. Wall Street Journal reporter De Santis had always covered business from the top down, writing about CEOs, earnings reports, mergers, and shareholder value. Raised in a privileged background, with an Ivy League education, she nonetheless longed to experience life on the factory floor. Hiding her journalism background, she applied for a factory job with GM and was eventually hired to work at a van manufacturing plant in Scarborough, Ontario. GM had already decided to close the Ontario plant 18 months in the future, thereby “downsizing” 2,700 workers (including the author). Unfortunately, De Santis isn’t really interested in the larger issues: “My interest wasn’t political in nature,” she admits; instead she focuses on “the people on the factory floor—who they were, how they got there” and what they’d do after losing their jobs. The work itself, from installing insulation panels to sweeping floors, proved physically exhausting; but De Santis comes across as tough, motivated, and genuinely concerned with her co-workers. She discovers the twin enemies of every factory worker: physical pain and mind-numbing monotony. Drugs and alcohol were the painkillers of choice among many of her co-workers. She meets a breathtaking diversity of people, from Chas the aspiring rock star to Lance the management wannabe to Gayle the avowed socialist. In one of her sharper insights, De Santis relates the patronizing attitude management often takes toward workers; when the factory achieved difficult production goals, management distributed free coffee, cheap baseball caps, and lots of “consultant hogwash” to “reward” the workers. While this is an absorbing and skillfully written personal account of one woman’s life on the factory floor, it’s doesn’t provide much of a window into today’s often-embattled workforce.
Pub Date: May 16, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48977-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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.
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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