An incisive look at the invisible forces of consumption shaping not just a single city, but our world.
Lessons to be learned from the history of Oakland, California.
In this expansive book, Madrigal explores Oakland’s ecosystem—from its storied past as home to longshoremen, Black Panthers, and the blues to its prospects as the epicenter of what he calls the Pacific Circuit—a “vast, powerful, opaque cultural structure” that controls the flow of consumer goods. Throughout the San Francisco Bay Area city, Madrigal says, he sees “the marriage of American capital and corporate know-how with Asian labor and technical capacity.” The book traces the rise of containerization, born of wartime need, how it links U.S. manufacturers to cheap Asian labor, and the ways it’s controlled by Silicon Valley. A journalist and author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology, Madrigal argues that it is in Oakland’s port where one can best view these economic, environmental, and cultural effects. The external costs to people and the environment, which result from the instant gratification of one-click consumption, are laid bare. One of the Pacific Circuit’s features is to siphon money from around the world and concentrate it locally. Billionaires and elite tech workers benefit. This, says Madrigal, is “the simple answer for why the Bay Area got so expensive.” Unfortunately, as he notes, “the deepest, most haunting forms of American racism work through property.” Here, he explores racial capitalism and how it has affected Black families living in the port’s shadow; the book is framed by his admiring portrait of Margaret Gordon, a community activist and former Oakland port commissioner whose “crowning achievement,” he writes, is the Maritime Air Quality Improvement Plan of 2009. Madrigal’s writing can be poetic, even when he’s examining sediment: “The mining waste fell where it would somewhere on the floor of the bay. Great dredging machines chomped and slurped up this material, and builders mixed it with whatever else was around, and it became fill. Compact it hard enough and it became land, new land, histories mixed and buried.”
An incisive look at the invisible forces of consumption shaping not just a single city, but our world.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780374159405
Page Count: 384
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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