Magnuson looks at how corporations operate in society but struggles to find a fresh perspective.
A law professor examines corporations through history and finds recurring themes.
Magnuson walks us through relevant eras of history, from the Roman Empire to the East India Company to Silicon Valley. In the early 1900s, Henry Ford provided the blueprint for the modern corporation, and firms like Exxon took the idea to the multinational level. There have always been questions about what a corporation should do. The usual answer is to maximize profits for shareholders, although there is a crucial caveat that corporations must not only obey the law, but should also heed unwritten social rules. Aside from this, there is another line of thinking that corporations have a responsibility to do good social works, although defining that is surprisingly difficult. Magnuson looks at tech giants like Facebook, which might have started with good motives but have become known for dubious ethical behavior and astonishing arrogance. As the author rightly points out, too many corporations now look only toward profit maximization, with no regard for anything else. This raises a key problem with the book. His descriptions of corporations throughout history focus largely on their negative aspects, but Magnuson concludes that “it is important to remember that corporations have been behind man’s greatest creations” and that “they are institutions for bringing people together to work toward common ends.” This position arrives abruptly near the end of the text, contradicting many of the author’s previous discussions. A bigger issue, however, is that the book offers little fresh information about a well-worn topic. Writers have been examining corporations, usually critically, for centuries. Even the reforms to encourage better corporate behavior that Magnuson presents have been well covered. It’s clear the author knows his subject well, but there’s just not much more to say about it.
Magnuson looks at how corporations operate in society but struggles to find a fresh perspective.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5416-0156-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.
A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.
Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798228309890
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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