Spirited reporting on workers’ lives.
The transformative potential of organized labor.
Labor journalist Nolan makes his book debut with a rousing look at union activities across the country and an impassioned argument for the protection of workers’ rights. Noting the small percentage of unionized workers in America, the author emphasizes the correlation between the decades-long decline in union membership and the commensurate increase in inequality. “Even in the bluest and most union-friendly states in the country,” he writes, “less than a quarter of working people are union members.” Many states—South Carolina, for one—are openly hostile to unions. In Las Vegas, the casino industry has continued to try to break the work of the Culinary Union, whose 60,000 members include housekeepers, porters, food servers, and cooks. In California, child care workers joined with domestic workers and school support staff to unionize. “A union,” Nolan reports, “does not need to arise out of a single group of workers who come to the same building every day and get paid by the same company. A union can be made from any coherent group of working people with a common interest—even if they are spread across a thousand miles of distance and work individually out of their homes and are not allowed to be a union, according to the current law.” Hospitality workers in Miami, fast food workers in West Virginia, Nabisco employees in Portland, Oregon, and graduate students at Yale all serve as examples of successful efforts to unionize, even as they fight resistance from recalcitrant bosses. Nolan interweaves his investigation of particular unions with a profile of Sara Nelson, a tireless union leader who became head of the Association of Flight Attendants in 2014 and emerged as a forceful spokesperson for workers’ rights. United labor, he writes, has the power to change the economic, social, and political landscape.
Spirited reporting on workers’ lives.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780306830921
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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