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THE PACIFIC CIRCUIT

Name: THE PACIFIC CIRCUIT
Author: Alexis Madrigal
ISBN: 9780374159405

A GLOBALIZED ACCOUNT OF THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF AN AMERICAN CITY

by Alexis Madrigal ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

An incisive look at the invisible forces of consumption shaping not just a single city, but our world.

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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

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | BUSINESS

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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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

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.