I agreed heartily with most of this book but it was oh. so. repetitive. Many (most?) people work “bullshit” jobs that could be automated, streamlined, or eliminated altogether; however, because they need the paycheck (or because middle managers need a certain minimum number of people underneath them), they find themselves trying desperately to look busy or otherwise justify their positions while despairing over the fact that what they do makes no meaningful contribution to the world. Meanwhile, people who work real, needed jobs (teachers, sanitation workers, caretakers) are deliberately undervalued and looked down upon despite fulfilling arguably more necessary and beneficial roles in society. This book would have been stronger without many of the first-person accounts that crowd the pages; any one would have been enough to illustrate Graeber’s point but he always includes multiple sources, and the accumulation of complaints from people trapped in dead-end jobs weighs upon you as you read. The book is a takedown of capitalism, which is supposed to produce hyper-efficiency but instead rewards bureaucracy (the more intricate your system, the more you can pass money around); it also lays bare the hypocrisy of pretending that if you aren’t working hard and long, you shouldn’t be paid, which forces workers into 40-hour work weeks doing work that could take them one tenth the time. The last chapter proposes a universal basic income, which after reading about all the nonsensical things people get paid for (and all the really vital work for which people don’t get paid), honestly seems like the only logical and fair way forward.
Tag: genre-nonfiction
We’re Not Broken, by Eric Garcia
The book’s subtitle is “Changing the Autism Conversation,” and Garcia does this by putting the voices of autistic people front and center, in direct contrast to most autism research which is written by neurotypical people and (he says) is more focused on finding a “cure” for autism, or on forcing autistic people to behave according to neurotypical norms, as opposed to helping them find ways to exist within the world that work for them. Funding for the autistic community also follows those lines. I definitely found it especially eye-opening when he interviewed nonverbal autistic people; without knowing it, I’d fallen into the trap of assuming that people who couldn’t communicate on my terms had little to say to me, which is far from the truth. Garcia also delves into the problems made worse by intersectionality; autism diagnoses (and solutions) have historically been focused towards cisgender white men. Unfortunately the book gets extremely dry and repetitive, which made it hard to get through, but I appreciated the perspectives provided, from people who often aren’t consulted before decisions are made that have a huge impact on them.
Beautiful Country, by Qian Julie Wang
“Beautiful Country” is the literal translation of the Chinese characters for “America.” When Wang was a little girl, her parents flew to the US to escape persecution in China (they were college professors who criticized the government). The family became undocumented immigrants in Brooklyn after their temporary visas expired, working in sweatshops and sifting through garbage for food and supplies. Her father enrolled her in a public school but her teachers and peers spoke English and Cantonese, not Mandarin, and she ended up in a special-needs classroom where she taught herself to read through picture books. Eventually she managed to get back into a normal classroom, but had to purposefully dumb down her writing when teachers accused her of plagiarism; she also had to hide their illegal status and learned to swallow insults as she tried to fit in with her American classmates. Her family was eventually able to emigrate to Canada and then legally return to the US, where she graduated from Swarthmore and Yale; it’s easy to point to hers as a success story, but her account highlights all the gaps through which children can fall, and all the ways in which talented professionals are wasted (between sweatshop jobs, her mother taught herself English and got a degree in computer science, yet was frustratingly unable to use it due to her illegal status). Wang does not provide answers, only wishing to shine a light on her traumatic upbringing.
This Place: 150 Years Retold
This is a collaborative graphic novel anthology, each story highlighting a person or a historical moment in the Indigenous people’s fight to survive in Canada. As the foreword says, each Indigenous story is a post-apocalyptic survival tale, which makes every Indigenous person a hero. Each contribution is prefaced with a timeline of events, unavoidable evidence of the government’s ongoing determination to stamp out Native cultures and Native people, and the stories shine a light on atrocities that the government would prefer to paper over, as well as on heroes that should be more widely celebrated. The book actually reminded me most of Four Hundred Souls, Ibram Kendi and Keisha Blain’s collaborative history of African America; like that book, it draws an unmistakable line from the government’s first racist actions to those of today, and also leaves you awed by the strength of all those who fought and survived.
In Order to Live, by Yeomi Park (with Maryanne Vollers)
Subtitled “A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom,” which about covers it. I have so many thoughts but quick summary: Park’s family had a pretty middle-class existence, thanks to her father smuggling items from China, until he was caught and sent to be reeducated, throwing her, her mother, and her older sister into poverty. Faced with malnutrition and starvation and ignorant of the world, first the sister, and then the narrator and her mother, worked with people who smuggled them into China, only to fall prey to human traffickers who “married” them to Chinese men. They eventually get the help of a religious mission and made it over the Mongolian border, and were eventually shipped to South Korea and freedom. I liked her description of the indoctrination that she got from childhood, and was particularly fascinated by how it stunted her vocabulary and emotions to the point that she didn’t know the word “love” could be applied to anyone besides the Dear Leader.
The author’s told her story several times in different ways and has been criticized for changing the details of her tale, so I’m dubious of some of the specifics. However, I don’t doubt her trauma or that she suffered; I understand why she might not want to get into some of the more painful parts, or why she might have edited her memories to cast herself in a more positive light. I’ve looked her up and she’s said some things I disagree with, but I’m glad she’s finally free to speak her mind, and has the vocabulary and education to be able to advocate for what she believes to be right.
You Can’t Be Serious, by Kal Penn
Kal Penn traces his journey from theater kid in New Jersey, to film/sociology major at UCLA (to his parents’ mild dismay), to Hollywood actor, and finally to Obama’s administration in DC. Lots of discussion of racism encountered in both childhood and adulthood; nothing that would be surprising to anyone who was paying attention, but still worth acknowledging. I liked how he shone a light on how his race disqualified him from most roles, except the ones where his race was specifically called for; and even after he landed a role, the racism would continue (“ok, but can you do that with a bit more of an Indian accent? I don’t care if you don’t think it adds anything to the character, we want the stereotypical accent” type of stuff). The political part of his career was less interesting reading than the acting part, but government work in general tends to be less exciting, so no surprise there.
Laziness Does Not Exist, by Devon Price
I came hoping for a nuanced critique of workaholic capitalism, and got positivity and compassion instead. Like most self-help books, this one can be summed up in a short paragraph, but it’s padded out with a ton of personal stories that Price hopes will resonate with you. The summary: the American workaholic culture makes you feel bad for taking time out for yourself, but don’t let that stop you! Taking breaks will stave off burnout, refresh your mind, rejuvenate your system, and make you a more productive person overall. The book is very geared towards a certain type of white-collar salaried worker with benefits, or maybe an overworked stay-at-home spouse being supported by their partner’s salary, who can afford to advocate for changes on their own behalf without fear of dismissal. There was passing acknowledgement of people working multiple jobs on the gig economy, but critique was directed more at the cultural/psychological pressure to stay busy and productive than any actual financial need, which I feel is rather dismissive of anyone who takes those jobs to make ends meet. Finally, the title is annoyingly incorrect; Price’s point is that laziness should not be a cultural negative, not that it doesn’t exist at all.
When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut
“This is a work of fiction based on real events,” says the author, and as such it’s weirdly disconcerting; you know the history, but you’re fuzzy on the details, and Labatut takes full advantage of that. The book kicks off with a mostly-factual account tracing the discovery of Prussian Blue to cyanide, poison, and its horrific use in the Holocaust; the author muses on the vibrant beauty of the color, and the stain that it left on history. The following stories go on to profile men of great brilliance, Schwarzschild and Heisenberg and Schrödinger among others, whose discoveries in math and science drive them to madness as they realize the destruction their ideas could wreak upon the world (or maybe, Labatut insinuates, they have to go mad to make these leaps of intuition at all). Their madness and visions are described with such lush prose that the feel of the text touches on gothic horror; fiction is woven so seamlessly into fact that you can’t draw a clear line between real and imaginary. The book swerves to end on a biographical, reflective tone, on which the narrator refuses to cut down a diseased tree; it is dying inside, but still tall and wide and of great sentimental value, and he does not wish to see the rot within. It functions as a kind of allegory: we can see and appreciate the outer structure of things, but if we dig too deeply, we may find ourselves revolted by what lies within, and the mere pursuit of that knowledge may bring it all crashing down around us.
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, by Michael Lewis
Lewis is a solid writer; he writes nonfiction like a thriller. We lived through the pandemic so when he starts describing the initial events, the rumors of illness, the blithe dismissal of the politicians, we know things are going south… but he still patiently lays the foundation: public health officers on shoestring budgets, with power on paper but very little in practice; government plans for pandemics drafted and discarded; politics and caution prized over effectiveness and rapid response. Reading this was an intensely frustrating exercise, punctuated by only brief moments of relief, especially since, let’s be real, we’re still in the middle of a public heath crisis, and now we know even more about how very few people are able (or willing) to do anything to manage it.
Huda F Are You? by Huda Fahmy
Really great comic, simply drawn and deeply felt, about the author’s experience growing up as one of five daughters in a Muslim family, and moving to Dearborn MI for high school. She goes from being “the girl in the hijab” in school to “just another girl in a hijab,” and has to settle on an identity for herself; she also finds that just being among more Muslims is not a free pass from discrimination.