An inspiring saga of grassroots political cooperation.
A fight to keep a Wisconsin paper mill open helps to rejuvenate labor politics in this impassioned nonfiction work.
Nelson was the county executive of Wisconsin’s Outagamie County in 2017 when the Appleton Coated paper mill was forced into receivership by its creditor PNC Bank—one of several mill shutdowns in the Fox River Valley paper-manufacturing region. Appleton Coated was the economic mainstay of the town of Combined Locks, providing it with 620 high-paying jobs and tax revenue, and its managers insisted it would be profitable after it weathered a rough patch of high wood-pulp prices and depressed markets and introduced new product lines. Nelson recounts that PNC claimed otherwise and that it used provisions in a loan agreement to take control of the mill and auction it to another company that planned to shutter and scrap it. Appleton Coated’s community rallied to its cause: Workers staged a “reverse strike” and kept the mill operating; the United Steelworkers Union local representing them filed an objection to the receivership sale in court and set about finding another buyer that would keep the mill up and running; and Nelson filed his own objection in court, citing the economic damage to the county that would result if the mill closed. A heated legal battle ensued, and the mill won a reprieve thanks to concessions from the union and government aid that Nelson pitched in. As a result, Appleton Coated duly made its way back to profitability in 2018. Over the course of this book, Nelson sets the mill’s story against a panorama of Wisconsin politics and economic issues, examining a rash of similar mill shutdowns and accusing Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who served from 2011 to 2019, and the state legislature’s Republican majority of being indifferent to the plight of the paper industry even as it gave electronics manufacturer FoxConn billions in subsidies for a new factory.
Nelson’s narrative offers an incisive insider’s view of industrial policy, pairing lucid analysis of the economics and practicalities of running a paper mill with bread-and-butter local politics. It’s also a tribute to organized labor—“As for the workers….They were the only adults in the room, demonstrating remarkable leadership and grace under immense pressure”—that offers readers an extensive history of unions in the state of Wisconsin. Nelson lays out a case for labor-law and immigration reform (“one underappreciated consequence of using immigration as a source of cheap labor has been a transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top of our economy”), but his fiery prose is anything but wonkish. The book presents an engrossing courtroom drama, an acerbic indictment of bank policy that’s also fair to the difficulties that business managers face, and communitarian paeans to blue-collar America: “This was my childhood. This was the American Dream.” The result is a compelling story of a struggle for economic survival that strives to get beyond ideological polarization and highlight ways that unions, businesses, and governments can help ordinary people.
An inspiring saga of grassroots political cooperation.Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-953943-00-2
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Rivertowns Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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