San Francisco–based veteran journalist Hill (Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way Is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age, 2010) examines the degenerative influences of technology businesses on the national economy.
Despite the massive wealth and innovation flourishing throughout Silicon Valley, there’s also a major downside, writes the author. It lies in the premise of a “sharing economy,” in which participating businesses actively repurpose or outsource formerly full-time positions with project-to-project freelancers and independent contractors who earn reduced salaries with little or no benefits packages. Hill argues that this trend has irreparably damaged the American workforce, making it increasingly impermanent, disposable, and transient. The author writes of personally experiencing this trend himself after being laid off from full-time employment and then having to pay exorbitant health care premiums and payroll tax payments as a freelance writer. There’s a “sheer arrogance of avarice” afoot in the country, Hill writes, and he zeroes in on a selection of popular, lucrative tech companies that have an impact on future economic forecasts. Bolstered by startling statistical data and a generous sampling of real-life profiles, the author supports his theories with examples of apps like short-term home-rental company Airbnb, ridesharing behemoth Uber, and gig-economy brokerage platforms like Upwork and TaskRabbit. They are all contributory, in their own capacities, to disruptive side effects ranging from slumping economic and employment scales to the fissuring of closely knit neighborhoods. Hill’s survey of the movement’s lethal underworld of drugs and crime, robotic automation, and “economic singularity” is equally alarming. Inasmuch as the author emerges as a detractor, he counters his mostly critical text with proactive solutions involving options like all-employee benefits packages, tax deductions, and labor law reform.
A provocative, remedy-based perspective on the joint complexities of economic stability and ever expanding technology.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-07158-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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Not an easy read but an essential one.
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Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A London-based journalist offers her perspective on race in Britain in the early 21st century.
In 2014, Eddo-Lodge published a blog post that proclaimed she was “no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race.” After its viral reception, she realized that her mission should be to do the opposite, so she actively began articulating, rather than suppressing, her feelings about racism. In the first chapter, the author traces her awakening to the reality of a brutal British colonial history and the ways that history continues to impact race relations in the present, especially between blacks and the police. Eddo-Lodge analyzes the system that has worked against blacks and kept them subjugated to laws that work against—rather than for—them. She argues that it is not enough to deconstruct racist structures. White people must also actively see race itself by constantly asking “who benefits from their race and who is disproportionately impacted by negative stereotypes.” They must also understand the extent of the privileges granted them because of their race and work through racist fears that, as British arch-conservative Enoch Powell once said, “the black man will [one day] have the whip hand over the white man.” Eddo-Lodge then explores the fraught question of being a black—and therefore, according to racist stereotype—“angry” female and the ways her “assertiveness, passion and excitement” have been used against her. In examining the relationship between race and class, the author further notes the way British politicians have used the term “white” to qualify working class. By leaving out reference to other members of that class, they “compound the currency-like power of whiteness.” In her probing and personal narrative, Eddo-Lodge offers fresh insight into the way all racism is ultimately a “white problem” that must be addressed by commitment to action, no matter how small. As she writes, in the end, “there's no justice, there's just us.”
A sharp, compelling, and impassioned book.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4088-7055-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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SEEN & HEARD
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