An important wake-up call with solid historical context.
How the U.S. lost its lead in the crucial area of microchip manufacturing and how it might be reclaimed.
Without microchips, entire industries can grind to a halt. “Most of the world’s GDP is produced with devices that rely on semiconductors,” writes Miller, who teaches international history at Tufts. “For a product that didn’t exist seventy-five years ago, this is an extraordinary ascent.” While it was primarily American scientists and entrepreneurs who created the industry, American chip manufacturing has lagged behind in recent years. Production happens in surprisingly few places, with one of the most important being Taiwan, where the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company provides 37% of the world’s logic chips and 11% of the world’s memory chips. Miller notes that in the early years of chip manufacture, when most of the painstaking work was done by hand, high labor costs in the U.S. pushed producers to look overseas, first to Japan. But then Japan became a major competitor. An answer was to undercut the Japanese firms by finding countries with even lower labor costs, such as South Korea and Taiwan. Eventually, those countries became competitors as well as partners. American tech firms were willing to send chip manufacture offshore so they could focus on their strengths of innovation and design. Apple, for example, is a major user of chips but makes absolutely none. As Miller shows, the problem with this globalization strategy is China, which has long sought to build its own chip industry, with mixed results. From Beijing’s perspective, Taiwan’s chip factories make the island an even more tempting target. Though the author doesn’t make any clear policy proposals, his implicit message to U.S. policymakers is to recognize the danger and act accordingly. America’s tech lead is shrinking, so the time has come to develop policies to ensure that the secret machinery of the digital era continues to operate smoothly.
An important wake-up call with solid historical context.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982172-00-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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